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T H E 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE D. D., 

itrmoR OF 

Crumbs Sweft Up;'^ ''Around the Tea Table; '' ^'Bvery Day Religion;^' 
''Sports thai KilV 



CHICAGO : 

J. FAIRBANKS & CO. 

BOSTON : EBEN SHUTE. NEW YORK : F. O. EVAKS & CO. 
SAN FRANCISCO: REV. J. B. HILL. 

1878. 



TH£ LIBRARY 
|oF CONGRESS 

WASMINOTOW 



OOPYRIGHT: 

•J- ^^AIRBANKS 6c CO. 

1.878. 



AUTHOR'S PRKFAOE. 



The following discourses were stenographically reported, 
and by me revised for publication, expressly for Messrs. J.. 
E^airbanks & Co., Chicago, 111., who are the only authorized 
publishers. T. DeWitt Talmagk. 

Brooklxjn, zVoy. 10, 1878. 



PUBLISHERS' ANNOUNCEMENT. 



In issuing Night Sides of City Life from our press, we do 
it in the profound conviction that the Christian community 
and the great American public in general will appreciate 
the soul-stirring discourses on the temptations and vices of 
City Life, written in Dr. Taimage's strongest descriptive 
powers, terrible in his earnestness, uncompromising in his 
denunciation of sin and wickedness, sparing none. This 
work is the only revised and authorized publication of 
Dr. Taimage's sermons. 

We shall issue, at an early aay, " Hearty Words for ail 
People," containing Dr. Taimage's addresses to the Profes- 
sions and Occupations, uniform with this edition. 

The Publishers. 



OONTKNTS. 



traAJPTBK. PAQS. 

Author's Pkeface - - - - - 3 

Publisher's Pkepack - _ _ _ 5 

Biographical Sketch - - - - - ? 

1. Personal Explorations \s the HAum\s ok 

Vice ------- J3 

2. Lepers jn High Life ----- 27 

3. The Gates of Hell - - - - 41 

4. Wno.Af T Saw, and Whom I Missed - Tk") 

5. Traps for Men ----- - (',7 

6 Strangers Warned - - - - TO 

7. People to be Feared - - - - 89 

8. The Worship of the Ctolden^ Calf - lOa 

9. Dry Goods Relkjion - - - - - I ir, 

10. The Reservoirs Salted - - - - l:>7 

11. The Battle for Bread _ _ _ - i:>9 

12. The TioRNEr's Mission - - - - 152 



T. DE WITT TALMAGE, D. D. 



Thomas DeWitt Talmage was boru in 1832, in Bound Brook, 
Somerset County, N. J. His father was a farmer of much vigor and 
consistency of character ; his mother a woman of noted energy, hope- 
fulness and equanimity. Both parents were in mai'ked respects char- 
acteristic. Difl'erences of disposition and methods blended in thera 
into a harmonious, consecrated, benignant and cheery life. The father 
won all the confidence and the best of the honors a hard-sensed truly 
American community had to yield. The mother was that counseling 
and quietly provident force which made her a helpmeet indeed and 
her home the center and sanctuary- of the sweetest influences that 
have fallen on the path of a large number of children, of whom 
four sons are all ministers of the Word. From a period ante-dating 
the Revolution, the ancestors of our subject were members of the Re- 
formed Dutch Church, in which Dr. Talmage's father was the lead- 
ing lay office bearer through a life extended beyond fourscore years. 
The youngest of the children, it seemed doubtful at first whether 
DeWitt would follow his brothers into the ministry. His earliest 
preference was the law, the studies of which he pursued for a year 
after his graduation with honors from the University of the City of New 
York. The faculties which would have made him the greatest jury 
advocate of the age were, how^ever, preserved for and directed to- 
ward the pulpit by an unrest which took the very sound of a cry 
within him for months, " Woe is me if I preach not the gospel.'' 
When he submitted to it the always ardent but never urged hopes of 
his honored parents were realized. He entered the ministry from the 
New Brunswick Seminary of Theology. As his destiny and powers 
came to manifestation in Brooklyn, his pastoral life prior to that was 
but a preparation for it. It can, therefore, be indicated as an inci- 
dental stage in his career rather than treated at length as a principal 
part of it. His first settlement wa^ at Belleville, on the beautiful 
Passaic, in New Jersey. For three years there he underwent an ex- 
cellent practical education in the conventional ministry. His congre- 
gation was about the most cultivated and exacting in the rural 



8 



BIOGRAPHICAL. 



regions of the sterling little state. Historically, it was known to be 
about the oldest society of Protestantism in New Jersey. Its records, 
as preserved, run back over 200 years, but it is known to have had a 
strong life the better part of a century more. Its structure is regarded 
as one of the finest of any country congregation in the United States. 
No wonder : it stands within rifle-shot of the quarry from which Old 
Trinity, in New York, was hewn. The value (and the limits) of 
stereotyped preaching and what he did not know came as an instruc- 
tive and disillusionizing force to the theological tyro at Belleville. 
There also came and remained strong friendships, inspiring revivals, 
and sacred counsels. • 

By natural promotion three years at Syracuse succeeded three at 
Belleville. That cultivated, critical city furnished Mr. Talmage the 
value of an audience in which professional men were predominant 
in influence. His preaching there grew tonic and free. As Mr. Pitt 
advised a young friend, he "risked himself" The church grew from 
few to many— from a state of coma to athletic life. The preacher 
learned to go to school to humanity and his own heart. The lessons 
they taught him agreed with what was boldest and most compelling 
in the spirit of the revealed Word. Those whose claims were sacred 
to him found the saline climate of Syracuse a cause of unhealth. 
Otherwise it is likely that that most delightful region in the United 
States — Central New York — for men of letters who equally love 
nature and culture, would have been the home of Mr. Talmage for 
life. 

The next seven years of Mr. Talmage's life were spent in Phila- 
delphia. There his powers got "set." He learned what it was he 
could best do. He had the courage of his consciousness and he did 
it. Previously he might have felt it incumbent on him to give to 
pulpit traditions the homage of compliance — though at Syracuse 
"the more excellent way," any man's own way, so that he have the 
divining gift of genius and the nature atune to all high sympa- 
thies and purposes — had in glimpses come to him. He realized that 
it was his duty and mission in the world to make it hear the gospel. 
The church was not to him in numbers a select few, in organization 
a monopoly. It was meant to be the conqueror and transformer of 
the world. For seven years he wrought with much success on this 
theory, all the time realizing that his plans could come to fullness 
only under conditions that enabled him to build from the bottom up 
an organization which could get nearer to the masses and which 
would have no precedents to be afraid of as ghosts in its path. Hence 
he ceased from being the leading preacher in Philadelphia to become 
in Brooklyn the leading preacher in the world. 



BIOGKAPHTCAL. 



9 



His work for nine years liere, know all our readers. It began in a 
cramped brick rectangle, capable of holding 1,200, and he came to it 
on. "the call " of nineteen. In less than two years that was exchanged 
for an iron structure, with raised seats, the interior curved like a 
horse shoe, the pulpit a platform bridging the* ends. That held 3,000 
persons. It lasted just long enough to revolutionize church archi- 
tecture in cities into harmony with common sense. Smaller dupli- 
cates of it started in every quarter, three in Brooklyn, two in New 
York, one in Montreal, one in Louisville, any number in Chicago^ 
two in San Francisco, like numbers abroad. Then it burnt np, that 
from its ashes the present stately and most sensible structure might 
rise. Gothic, of brick and stone, cathedral-like above, amphitheatre- 
like below, it holds 5,000 as easily as one person, and all can hear and 
see equally well. In a large sense the people built these edifices. 
Their architects were Leonard Vaux and John Welch respectively. 
It is sufficiently indicative to say in general of Dr. Talmage's work 
in the Tabernacle, that his audiences are always as many as the place 
will hold; that twenty-three papers in Christendom statedly publish 
his entire sermons and Friday night discourses, exclusive of the 
dailies of the United States; that the papers girdle the globe, 
being published in London, Liverpool, Manchester, Glasgow, Belfast, 
Toronto, Montreal, St, John's, Sidney, Melbourne, San Francisco, 
Chicago, Boston, Raleigh, New York, and many others. To pulpit 
labors of this responsibility should be added considerable pastoral 
work, the conduct of the Lay College, and constantly recuiTing lec- 
turing and literary work, to fill out the public life of a veiy busy 
man. 

The multiplicity, large results and striking progress of the labors 
of Dr. Talmage have made the foregoing more of a brief narrative 
of the epochs of his career than an account of the career itself. It 
has had to be so. Lack of space requires it. His work has had 
rather to be intimated in generalities than told in details. The filling 
in must come either from the knowledge of the reader or from intel- 
ligent inferences and conclusions, drawn from the few principal facts 
stated, and stated with care. This remains to be said: No 
other preacher addresses so many constantly. The words of no other 
preacher were ever before carried by so many types or carried so 
far. Types give him three continents for a church, and the English- 
speaking world for a congregation. The judgment of his generation 
will of course be divided upon him just as that of the next will not 
That he is a topic in every new^spaper is much more significant 
than the fact of what treatment it gives him. Only men of genius 



10 



BIOGRAPHICAL. 



are universally commented on. The universality of the comment 
makes friends and foes alike prove the fact of the genius. That is 
what is impressive — as for the quality of the comment, it will^ in 
nine cases out of ten, be much more a revelation of the character be- 
hind the pen which writes it ttian a true view or review of the 
man. This is necessarily so. The press and the pulpit in 
the main are defective judges of one another. The former rarely 
enters the inside of the latter's work. There is acquaintanceship, but 
not intimacy between them. Journals find out the fact of a preacher's 
power in time. Then they go looking for the causes. Long before, 
however, the masses have felt the causes and have realized,not merely 
discovered, the fact. The penalty of being the leaders of great masses 
has, from Whitefield and Wesley to Spurgeon and Talmage, been 
to serve as the target for small wits. A constant source of attack on 
men of such magnitude always has been and will be the presses 
which, by the common consent of mankind, are described and dis- 
pensed from all consideration, when they are rated Satanic. Their 
attacks confirm a man's right to respect and reputation, and are a 
proof of his influence and greatness. It can be truly said that while 
secular criticism In the tJnited States favorably regards our subject 
in proportion to its intelligence and uprightness, the judgment of 
foreigners on him has long been an index to the judgment of pos- 
terity here. No other American is read so much and so constantly 
abroad. His extraordinary imagination, earnestness, descriptive 
powers and humor, his great art in grouping and arrangement, his 
wonderful mastery of words to illumine and alleviate human condi- 
tions and to interpret and inspire the harmonies of the better nature, 
are appreciated by all who can put themselves in sympathy with his 
originality of methods and his high consecration of purpose. His man- 
ner mates with his nature. It is each sermon in action. He presses the 
eyes, hands, his .entire body, into the service of the illustrative 
truth. Gestures are the accompaniment of what he says. As he 
stands out before the immense throng, without a scrap of notes or 
manuscript before him,the effect produced can not be understood by 
those who have never seen it. The solemnity, the tears, the awful 
hush, as though the audience could not breathe again, are ofttimes 
painful. 

His voice is pQCuliai-,not musical, but productive of startling,8trong 
effects,^ such as characterize no preacher on either side of the Atlantic. 
His power to grapple an audience and master it from text to perora- 
tion has no equal. No man was ever less self-conscious in his work. 
He feels amission of evangelization on him as by the imposition of 



BIOGRAPHrOAL. 



11 



the Supreme. That mission he responds to by doing th'^ duty that is 
nearest to him with all his might — as confident that he is under the 
care and order of a Divine Master as those who hear him are that they 
are under the spell of the greatest prose-poet that ever made the gos- 
pel his song and the redemption of the race the passion of his heart. 

The following discourses were taken down by stenographic re- 
porters and revised by the author. On the occasion of their delivery 
the church was thronged beyond description, the streets around 
blockaded with people so that carriages could not pass, Mr. Talmage 
himself gaining a<lmission only by the help of the police. 



CHAPTER 1. 



A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 

" When said he unto me, Son of man, dig now in the wall ; and 
when I had digged in the wall, behold a door. And he said unto 
me, Go in and behold the wicked abominations that they do here. So I 
went in and saw ; and behold every form of creeping things and 
abominable beasts."— Ezekiel, viii: 8, 9, 10. 

So this minister of religion, Ezekiel, was commanded 
to the exploration of the sin of his day. He was not to 
stand outside the door guessing what it was, but was to 
go in and see for himself. He did" not in vision say: 
" O Lord, I don't wan't to go in ; I dare not go in ; if I 
go in 1 might be criticised ; O Lord, please let me off ?" 
When God told Ezekiel to go in he went in, " and saw, 
and behold all manner of creeping things and abomin- 
able beasts." I, as a minister of religion, felt I had a 
Divine commission to explore the iniquities of our 
cities. I did not ask counsel of my session, or my Pres- 
bytery, or of the newspapers, but asking the companion- 
ship of three prominent police officials and two of the 
elders of my church, I unrolled my commission, and 
it said : " Son of man, dig into the wall ; and when I 
had digged into the wall, behold a door ; and he said, 
Go in and see the wicked abominations that are done 
here ; and I went in, and saw, and behold Brought 
up in the country and surrounded by much parental 
care, I had not until this autumn seen the haunts of 
iniquity. By the grace of God defended, I had never 



NIGHT SrDKS OF CITY LIFE, 



sowed any " wild oats." I had somehow been able to 
tell from various sources something about the iniquities 
of the great cities, and to preach against them ; but I 
saw, in the destruction of a great multitude of the peo- 
ple, that there must be an infatuation and a temptation 
that had never been spoken about, and I said, " I will 
explore." I saw tens of thousands of men going dowii, 
and if there had been a spiritual percussion answering to 
the physical percussion, the whole air would have been 
lull of the rumble, and roar, and crack, and thunder of 
the demolition, and this moment, if we should pause in 
our service, we should hear the crash, crash ! Just as in 
the sickly season you sometimes hear the bell at the gate 
of the cemetery ringing almost incessantly, so I found 
that the bell at the gate of the cemetery where lost souls 
are buried was tolling by day and tolling by night. I 
said, " I will explore." I went as a physician goes into 
a small-pox hospital, or a fever lazzaretto, to see what 
practical and useful information 1 might get. That 
would be a foolish doctor who would stand outside the 
door of an invalid writing a Latin prescription. When 
the lecturer in a medical college is done with his lecture 
he takes the students into the dissecting room, and he 
shows them the reality. I am here this morning to report 
a plague, and to tell you how sin dissects the body, and 
dissects the mind, and dissects the soul. "Oh!" say 
you, " are you not afraid that in consequence of your 
exploration of the inquities of the city other persons 
may make exploration, and do themselves damage ?" I 
reply: "If, in company with the Commissioner of 
Police, and the Captain of Police, and the Inspector of 
Police, and the company of two Christian gentlemen, 
and not with the spirit of curiosity, but that you may 
see sin in order the better to combat it, then, in the name 



A PERSONAL EXPLORATION tN HAUNTS OF VICR. 15 

of the eternal God, go ? But, if not, then stay awaj. 
Wellington, standing in the battle of Waterloo when 
the bullets were buzzing around his head, saw a civilian 
on the field. He said to him, " Sir, what are you 
doing here Be off?" "Why," replied the civilian, 
there is no more danger here for me than there is for 
you." Then Wellington flushed up and said, " God and 
my country demand that I be here, but you have no 
errand here." Now I, as an oiScer in the army of Jesus 
Christ, went on this exploration, and on to this battle- 
field. If you bear a like commission, go ; if not, 
stay away. But you say, " Don't you think that some- 
how jour description of these places will induce people 
to go and see for themselves ?" I answer, yeK, just as 
much as the description of the yellow fever at Grenada 
would induce people to go down there and get the pesti- 
lence. It was told us there were hardly enough people 
alive to bury the dead, and I am going to tell you a 
story in these Sabbath morning sermons of places where 
they are all dead or dying. And I shall not gild iniqui 
ties. I shall play a dirge and not an anthem, and while 
I shall not put faintest blush on fairest cheek, I will 
kindle the cheeks of many a man into a conflagration, 
and I will make his ears tingle. But you say, " Don't 
you know that the papers are criticising you for the 
position you take?" I say, yes ; and do you know how 
I feel about it ! There is no man who is more indebted 
to the newspaper press than I am. My business is to 
preach the truth, and the wider the audience the news- 
paper press gives me, the wider my field is. As the 
secular and religious press of the United States and the 
Canadas, and of England and Ireland and Scotland and 
Australia and I^ew Zealand, are giving me every week 
nearly three million souls for an audience, I say I am 



16 



OTGHT SIDES OF OITY LIFE. 



indebted to the press, anyhow. Go on ! To the day of 
my death I cannot pay them what I owe them. So slash 
away, gentlemen. The more the merrier. If there is 
anything I despise, it is a dull time. Brisk criticism is 
a coarse Turkish towel, with which every public man 
needs every day to be rubbed down, in order to keep 
healthful circulation. Give my love to all the secular 
and religious editors, and full permission to run their 
steel pens clear through my sermons, from introduction 
to application. 

It was ten o'clock of a calm, clear, star-lighted night 
when the carriage rolled with us from the bright part of 
the city down into the region where gambling and crime 
and death hold high carnival. When I speak of houses 
of dissipation, I do not refer to one sin, or five sins, but 
to all sins. As the horses halted, and, escorted by the 
officers of the law, we went in, we moved into a world 
of which we were as practically ignorant as though it 
had swung as far off from us as Mercury is from Saturn. 
JSTo shout of revelry, no guffaw of laughter, but compar- 
ative silence. 'Not many signs of death, but the dead 
were there. As I moved through this place 1 said, 
"This is the home of lost souls." It was a Dante's 
Inferno; nothing to stir the mirth, but many things to 
fill the eyes with tears of pity. Ah ! there were moral 
corpses. There were corpses on the stairway, 
corpses in the gallery, corpses in the gardens. Leper 
met leper, but no bandaged mouth kept back the 
breath. I felt that I was sitting on the iron coast against 
which Euroclydon had driven a hundred dismasted 
hulks — every moment more blackened hulks rolling in. 
And while I stood and waited for the goin^ down of the 
storm and the lull of the sea, I bethought myself, this 
is an everlasting storm, and these billows always rage, 



A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 17 



and on each carcass that strewed the beach already had 
alighted a vulture — the long-beaked, filthy vulture of 
unending dispair — now picking into the corruption, and 
now on the black wing wiping the blood of a soul ! No 
lark, no robin, no chaffinch, but vultures, vultures, vul- 
tures. I was reading of an incident that occurred in 
Pennsylvania a few weeks ago, where a naturalist had 
presented to him a deadly serpent, and he put it in a 
bottle and stood it in his studio, and one evening, 
while in the studio with his daughter, a bat flew in the 
window, extinguished the light, struck the bottle con- 
taining the deadly serpent, and in a few moments there 
was a shriek Irom the daughter, and in a few hours she 
was dead. She had been bitten of the serpent. Amid 
these haunts of death, in that midnight exploration I 
saw that there were lions and eagles and doves for in- 
signia; but I thought to myself how inappropriate^ 
Better the insignia of an adder and a bat. 

First of all, I have to report as a result of this mid- 
night exploration that all the sacred rhetoric about the 
costly magnificence of the haunts of iniquity is apocry- 
phal. We were shown what was called the costliest and 
most magnificent specimen. I had often heard that the 
walls were adorned with masterpieces; that the fountains 
were bewitching in the gaslight; that the music was like 
the touch of a Thai berg or a Gottschalk; that the uphol- 
stery was imperial; that the furniture in some places 
was like the throne-room of the Tulleries. It is all false. 
Masterpieces! There w^as not a painting worth $5, leav- 
ing aside the frame. Great daubs of color that no 
intelligent mechanic would put on his wall. A cross- 
breed between a chromo and a splash of poor paint! 
Music! Some of the homeliest creatures I ever saw 
squawked discord, accompanied by pianos out of tune! 



18 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



Upliolstery? Two characteristics; red and cheap. You 
have heard so much about the wonderful lights — blue 
and green and yellow and orange flashing across the 
dancers and the gaj groups. Seventy-five cents' worth 
of chemicals would produce all that in one night. Tinsel 
gewgaws, tawdriness frippery, seemingly much of it 
bought at a second-hand furniture store and never paid 
for! For the most part^ the inhabitants were repulsive. 
Here and there a soul on whom God had put the crown 
of beauty, but nothing comparable with the Christian 
loveliness and purity which you may see any pleasant 
afternoon on any of the thoroughfares of our great cities. 
Young man, you are a stark fool if you go to places of 
dissipation to see pictures, and hear music, and admire 
beautiful and gracious countenances. From Thomas's, or 
Dodworth's, or Gilmore's Band, in ten minutes you will 
hear more harmony than in a whole year of the racket 
and bang of the cheap orchestras of the dissolute. Come 
to me, and I will give you a letter of introduction to 
any one of five hundred homes in Brooklyn and New 
York, where you will see finer pictures and liear more 
beautiful music—music and pictures compared with which 
there is nothing worth speaking of in houses of dissi- 
pation. Sin, however pretentious, is almost always poor. 
Mirrors, divans, Chickering grand she cannot keep. The 
sheriff is after it with uplifted mallet, ready for the ven- 
due. " Going ! going ! gone ! 

But, my friends, I noticed in all the haunts of dissi- 
pation that there was an attempt at music, however poor. 
The door swung open and shut to music; they stepped to 
music; they danced to music; they attempted nothing 
without music, and I said to myself, " If such inferior 
music has such power, and drum, and fife, and orchestra 
are enlisted in the service of the devil, what multipotent 



A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 19 

power there must be in music ! and is it not high time 
that in all our churches and reform associations we 
tested how much charm there is in it to bring men 
off the wrong road to the right road?" Fifty times that 
night I said within myself, " If poor music is so power- 
ful in a bad direction, why cannot good music be almost 
omnipotent in a good direction?" Oh! my friends, we 
want to drive men into the kingdom of God with a mus- 
ical staff. We want to shut off the path of death with 
a musical bar. We want to snatch all the musical instru- 
ments from the service of the devil, and with organ, and 
cornet, and base viol, and ])iano and orchestra praise the 
Lord. Good Richard Cecil when seated in the pulpit, 
said that when Doctor Wargan w^as at the organ, he, Mr. 
Cecil, was so overpowered with the music that he found 
himself looking for the first chapter of Isaiah in the 
prayer book, wondering he could not find it. Oh! holy 
bewilderment. Let us send such men as Phillip Phillips, 
the Christian vocalist, all around the w^orld, and 
Arbuckle, the cornest, with his ^' Kobin Adair '* set to 
Christian melody, and George Morgan with his Hallelu- 
ah Chorus, and ten thousand Christian men with up- 
lifted hosannas to capture this whole earth for God. Oh! 
my friends, we have had enough minor strains in the 
church; give us major strains. We have had enough 
dead marches in the church; play us those tunes which 
are played when an army is on a dead run to overtake an 
enemy. Give us the double-quick. We are in full 
gallop of cavalry charge. Forward, the whole line! 
Many a man who is unmoved by Christian argument 
surrenders to a Christian song. 

Many a man under the power of. Christian music has 
had a change take place in his soul and in his life equal 
to that which took place in the life of a man in Scot- 



20 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



land, who for fifteen years had been a drunkard. Com- 
ing home late at night, as he touched the doorsill, his 
wife trembled at his coming. Telling the story after- 
ward, she said, "I didn't dare go to bed lest he violently 
drag me forth. When he came home there was only 
about the half inch of the candle left in the socket. 
When he entered, he said: 'Where are the children?^ 
and I said, 'They are up stairs in bed.' He said, 'Go 
and fetch them,' and I went up and I knelt down and I 
prayed God to defend me and my children from their 
cruel father. And then I brought them down. He 
took up the eldest in his arms and kissed her and said, 
'My dear lass, the Lord hath sent thee a father home to- 
night.' And so he did with the second, and then he 
took up the third of the children and said, 'My dear boy, 
the Lord hath sent thee home a father to-night.' And 
then he took up the babe and said, 'My darling babe, the 
Lord hath sent thee home a father to-night.' And then 
he put his arm around me and kissed me, and said, 'My 
dear lass, the Lord hath sent thee home a husband 
to-night.' Why, sir, I had na' heard anything like that 
for fourteen years. And he prayed and he was com- 
forted, and my soul was restored, for 1 didn't live as I 
ought to have lived, close to God. My trouble had 
broken me down." Oh! for such a transformation in 
some of the homes of Brooklyn to-day. By holy con- 
spiracy, in the last song of the morning, let us sweep 
every prodigal into the kingdom of our God. Oh! ye 
chanters above Bethlehem, come and hover this morning 
and give us a snatch of the old tune about "good will to 
men." 

But I have, also to report of that midnight ex- 
ploration, that I saw something that amazed me more 
than I can tell. I do not want to tell it, for it will 



A PERSONAL EXfLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 21 

take pain to many hearts far away, and 1 cannot comfort 
them. But I must tell it. In all these haunts of 
iniquity I found young men with the ruddy color of 
country health on their cheek, evidently just come to 
town for business, entering stores, and shops, and offices. 
They had helped gather the summer grain. There they 
were in haunts of iniquity, the look on their cheek which 
is never on the cheek except when there has been hard 
work on the farm and in the open air. Here were these 
young men who had heard how gayl}- a boat dances on 
the edge of a maelstrom, and they were venturing. O, 
God! will a few weeks do such an awful work for a 
young man? O Lord! hast thou forgotten what trans- 
pired when they knelt at the family altar that morning 
when he came away, and how father's voice trembled in 
the prayer, and mother and sister sobbed as they lay on 
the floor? I saw that young man when he first con- 
fronted evil. I saw it was the first night there. I saw 
on him a defiant look, as much as to say, "I am mightier 
than sin." Then I saw him consult with iniquity. 
Then I saw him waver and doubt. Then I saw going 
over his countenauce the shadow of sad reflections, and 
I knew from his looks there was a powerful memory 
stirring his soul. 1 think there was a whisper going 
out from the gaudy upholster\ , saying, " M}^ son, go 
home." I think there was a hand stretched out from 
under the curtains — a hand tremulous with anxiety, a 
hand that had been worn with work, a hand partly 
wrinkled with age, that seemed to beckon him away, 
and so goodness and sin seemed to struggle in that 
young man's soul; but sin triumphed, and he surren- 
dered to darkness and to death— an ox to the slaughter. 
Oh! my soul, is this the end of all the good advice? Is 
this the end of all the prayers that have been made? 



22 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



Have the clusters of the country vineyard been thrown 
into this great wine-press where Despair and Anguish 
and Death trample, and the vintage is a vintage of blood? 
I do not feel so sorry for that young man who- brought 
up in city life, knows beforehand what are all the sur- 
rounding temptations; but God pity the country lad 
unsuspecting and easily betrayed. Oh! young man 
from the farmhouse among the hills, what have your 
parents done that you should do this against them? 
Why are you bent on killing with trouble her who gave 
you birth? Look at her fingers — what makes them so 
distort? Working for you. Do you prefer to that hon- 
est old face the berouged- cheek of sin ? Write home 
to-morrow morning by the first mail, cursing your 
mother's white hair, cursing her stooped shoulder, curs- 
ing her old arm-chair, cursing the cradle in which she 
rocked you. ''Oh!" you say, "L can't, I can't." You 
are doing it already. There is^something on your hands, 
on your forehead, on your feet. It is red. What is it? 
The blood of a mother's broken heart! When you were 
threshing the harvest apples from that tree at the corner 
of the field lasc summer, did you think you would 
ever come to this? Did you think that the sharp 
sickle of death would cut you down so soon? If I 
thought I could break the infatuation I would come 
down from ^he pulpit and throw my arms around you 
and beg you to stop. Perhaps I am a little more sym- 
pathetic with such because I was a country lad. It was 
not until fifteen years of age that I saw a great city. I 
remember how stupendous New York looked as I arrived 
at Cortlandt Ferry. And now that I look back and 
remember that I had a nature all awake to hilarities and 
amusements, it is a wonder that I escaped. I was say- 
ing this to a gentleman in New York a few days ago, 



A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 23 

and he said, "Ah! sir, I guess there were some prayers 
hovering about." When I see a young man coming 
from the tame life of the country and goin^ down in the 
city ruin, I am not surprised. My only surprise is that 
any escape, considering the allurements. I was a few 
days ago on the St. Lawrence river, and I said to the 
captain, "What a swift stream this is." "Oh!" he 
replied, " seventy-five miles from here it is ten times 
swifter. Why, we have to employ an Indian pilot, and 
we give him $1,000 for his summer's work, just to con- 
duct our boats through between the rocks and the islands, 
so swift are the rapids." Well, my friends, every man that 
comes into J^ew York and Brooklyn life comes into the 
rapids, and the only question is whether he shall have 
safe or unsafe pilotage. Young man, your bad habits 
will be reported at the homestead. You cannot hide 
them. There are people who love to carry bad news, 
and there will be some accursed old gossip who will wend 
her infernal step toward the old homestead, and she will 
sit down, and, after she has a while wriggled in the 
chair, she will say to your old parents, "Do you know 
your son drinks?" Then your parents will get white 
about the lips, and your mother will ask to have the 
door set a little open for the fresh air, and before that 
old gossip leaves the place she will have told your parents 
all about the places where you are accustomed to go. 
Then your mother will come out, and she will sit down 
on the step where you used to play, and she will cry and 
cry. Then she will be sick, and the gig of the country 
doctor will come up the country lane, and the horse will 
be tied at the swing-gate, and the prescription will fail, 
and she will get worse and worse, and in her delirium 
she will talk about nothing but you. Then the farmers 
will come to the funeral, and tie the horses at the rail 



24 



NIG^HT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



fence aoout the house, and they will talk about what 
ailed the one that iied, and one will say it was inter- 
mittent, and another will say it was congestion, and 
another will say it was premature old age; but it will be 
neither intermittent, nor congestion, nor old age. In the 
ponderous book of Almighty God it will be recorded for 
everlasting ages to :*ead that you killed her. Our lan- 
guage is very fertile in describing dilFerent kinds of 
crime. Slaying a man is homicide. Slaying a brother 
is fratricide. Slaying a father is patricide. Slaying a 
mother is matricide. It takes two words to describe 
your crime — patricide and matricide. 

I must leave to other Sabbath mornings the unrolling 
of the scroll which I have this morning only laid on 
your table. We have come only to the vestibule of the 
subject. I have been treating of generals. I shall come 
to specifics. I have not told you of all the styles of peo- 
ple I saw in the haunts of iniquity. Before I get 
through with these sermons and next Sabbath morning 
I will answer the question everywhere asked me, why 
does municipal authority allow these haunts of iniquity? 

I will show all the obstacles in the way. Sirs, before 
I get through with this course of Sabbath morning ser- 
mons, by the help of the eternal God, I will save ten 
thousand men! And m the execution of this mission I 
defy all earth and hell. 

But I was going to tell you of an incident. I said to 
the officer, " Well, let us go; I am tired of this scene;'' 
and as we passed out of the haunts of iniquity into the 
fresh air, a soul passed in. What a face that was! Sor- 
row only half covered up with an assumed joy. It was 
a woman's face. I saw as plainly as on the page of a 
book the tragedy. You know that there is such a thing 
as somnambulism, or walking in one's sleep. Well, in 



A PERSONAL EXPLORATION IN HAUNTS OF VICE. 25 

a fatal somnambulism, a soul started off from her father's 
house. It was very dark, and her feet were cut of the 
rocks; but on she went until she came to the verge of a 
chasm, and she began to descend from bowlder to 
bowlder down over the rattling shelving — for you know 
while walking in sleep people will go where they would 
not go when awake. Further on down, and further, 
where no owl of the night or hawk of the day would 
venture. On down until she touched the depth of the 
chasm. Then, in walking sleep, she began to ascend 
the other side of the chasm, rock above rock, as the roe 
boundeth. Without having her head to swim with the 
awful steep, she scaled the height. No eye but the 
sleepless eye of God watched her^as she went down one 
side the chasm and came up the other side the chasm. 
It was an August night, and a storm was gathering, and 
a loud burst of thunder awoke her from her somnambu- 
lism, and she said, " Whither shall I fly?" and with an 
affrighted eye she looked back upon the chasm she had 
crossed, and she looked in front, and there was a deeper 
chasm before her. She said, ''What shall I do? Must 
I die here?" And as she bent over the one chasm, she 
heard the sighing of the past; and as she bent over the 
other chasm, she heard the portents of the future. Then 
she sat down on the granite crag, and cried: "O! for my 
father's house! O! for the cottage, where I might die 
amid embowering honeysuckle! O! the past! O! the 
future! O! father! O! mother! O! God!" But the 
storm that had been gathering culminated, and wrote 
with finger of lightning on the sky just above the hori- 
zon, "The way of the transgressor is hard." And then 
thunder-peal after thunder-peal uttered it: "Which for- 
saketh the guide of her youth and forgetteth the cove- 
nant of her God. Destroyed without remedy!" And 



26 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



the cavern behind echoed it, Destroyed without rem- 
edy!'' And the chasm before echoed it, "Destroyed 
without remedy!" There she perished, her cut and 
bleeding feet on the edge of one chasm, her long locks 
washed of the storm dripping over the other chasm. 

But by this time our carriage had reached the curb- 
stone of my dwelling, and I awoke, and behold it was a 
dream I 



THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE, 



27 



CHAPTER II. 

THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 
"Policeman, what of the night ?"—Isaiali xxi: 11. 

The original of the text may be translated either 
" watchman or policeman." I have chosen the latter 
word. The olden- time cities were all thus guarded. 
There were roughs, and thugs, and desperadoes in Jeru- 
salem, as well as there are in 'New York and Brooklyn. 
The police headquarters of olden time was on top of the 
city wall. King Solomon, walking incognito through 
the streets, reports in one of his songs that he met these 
officials. King Solomon must have had a large posse of 
police to look after his royal grounds, for he had twelve 
thousand blooded horses in his stables, and he had mil- 
lions of dollars in his palace, and he had six hundred 
wives, and, though the palace was large, no house was 
ever large enough to hold two women married to the 
same man; much less could six hundred keep the peace. 
Well, the night was divided into three watches, the first 
watch reaching from sundown to 10 o'clock; the second 
watch from 10 o'clock to two in the morning; the third 
watch from two in the morning to sunrise. An Idumean, 
anxious about the prosperity of the city, and in regard 
to any danger that might threaten it, accosts an officer 
just as you might any night upon our streets, saying, 
"Policeman, what of the night?" Policemen, more 
than any other people, understand a city. Upon them 



28 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



are vast responsibilities for small pay. The police officer 
of 3^our city gets $1,100 salary, but he may spend only 
one night of an entire month in his family. The detect- 
ive of your city gets $1,500 salary, but from January to 
January there is not an hour that he may call his own 
Amid cold and heat and tem^^est, and amid the perils of 
the bludgeon of the midnight assassin, he does his work. 
The moon looks down upon nine- tenths of the iniquity 
of our great cities. What wonder, then, that a few 
weeks ago, in the interest of morality and religion, I 
asked the question of the text, " Policeman, what of the 
night?" In addition to this powerful escortage, I asked 
two elders of the church to accompany me; not because 
they were any better than the other elders of the church, 
but because they were more muscular, and I was resolved 
that in any case where anything more than spiritual 
defense was necessary, to refer the whole matter to their 
hands! I believe in muscular Christianity. I wish that 
our theological seminaries, instead of sending out so 
many men with dyspepsia and liver complaint and all 
out of breath by the time they have climbed to the top 
of the pulpit stairs, would, through gymnasiums and 
other means, send into the pulpit physical giants as well 
as spiritual athletes. I do wish I could consecrate to the 
Lord two hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois weight? 
But, borrowing the strength of others, I started out on 
the midnight exploration. I was preceded in this work 
by Thomas Chalmers, who opened every door of iniquity 
in Edinburgh before he established systematic ameliora- 
tion, and preceded by Thomas Guthrie, who explored all 
the squalor of the city before he established the ragged 
schools, and by every man who has done anything to 
balk crime, and help the tempted and the destroyed. 
Above all, I followed in the footsteps of Him who was 



THE LEPERS OP HIGH LIFE. 



29 



derided by the hypocrities and the sanhedrims of his 
day, because he persisted in exploring the deepest moraV 
shish of his time, going down among demoniacs and 
paupers and adulteresses, never so happy as when he 
had ten lepers to cure. Some of joa may have been 
surprised that there was a great hue and cry raised be- 
fore these sermons were begun, and sometimes the hue 
cry was made by professors of religion. I was not sur- 
prised. The simple fact is that in all our churches there 
are lepers who do not want their scabs touched, and they 
foresaw that before I got through with this series of ser- 
mons I would show up some of the wickedness and 
rottenness of what is called the upper class. The devil 
howled because he knew I was going to hit him hard! 
Now, I say to all such men, whether in the church or 
out of it, Ye hypocrites, ye generation of vipers, how 
can ye escape the damnation of hell?" 

I noticed in my midnight exploration with these high 
oflScials that the haunts of sin are chiefly supported by 
men of means and men of wealth. The young men 
recently come from the country, of whom I spoke last 
Sabbath morning, are on small salary, snd they have 
but little money to spend in sin, and if they go into lux- 
uriant iniquity the employer finds it out by the inflamed 
eye and tiie marks of dissipation, and they are discharged. 
The luxuriant places of iniquity are supported by men 
who come down from the fashionable avenues of New York' 
and cross over from some of the finest mansions of Brook- 
lyn. Prominent business men from Boston, Philadelphia, 
and Chicago, and Cincinnati patronize these places of 
crime. I could call the names of prominent men in 
our cluster of cities who patronize these places of in- 
iquity, and I may call their names before I get through 
this course of sermons, though the fabric of New York 



so 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



and Brooklyn society tumble into wreck. Judges of 
courts, distinguished lawyers, officers of the church, 
political orators standing on Republican and Democratic 
and Greenback platforms talking about God and good 
morals until you might suppose them to be evangelists 
expecting a thousand converts in one night. Call the 
roll of dissipation in the haunts of iniquity any night, 
and if the inmates will answer, ^^ou will find there stock- 
brokers from Wall street, large importers from Broad- 
way, iron merchants, leather merchants, cotton mer- 
chants, hardware merchants, wholesale grocers, repre- 
sentatives from all the commercial and wealthy classes. 
Talk about the heathenism below Canal street! There 
is a worse heathenism above Canal street. I prefer 
that kind of heathenism which wallows in filth and dis- 
gusts the beholder rather than that heathenism which 
covers up its walking putrefaction with camel's-hair 
shawl and point lace, and rides in turnouts worth $3,000? 
liveried driver ahead and resetted flunky behind. We 
have been talking so much about the gospel for the 
masses; now let us talk a little about the gospel for the 
lepers of society, for the millionaire sots, for the portable 
lazzarettos of upper-tendom. It is the iniquity that 
comes down from the higher circles of society that sup- 
ports the haunts of crime, and it is gradually turning 
our cities into Sodoms and Gomorrahs waiting for the 
fire and ' brimstone tempest of the Lord God who 
whelmed the cities of the plain. We want about five 
hundred Anthony Comstocks to go forth and explore 
and expose the abominations of high life. For eight or 
ten years there stood within sight of the most fashionable 
New York drive a Moloch temple, a brown -stone hell on 
earth, which neither the Mayor, nor the judges, nor the 
police dared touch, when Anthony Oomstock, a Christian 



TAB LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 81 

man of less than average physical stature, and with 
cheek scarred by the knife of a desperado whom he had 
arrested, walked into that palace of the damned on Fifth 
avenue, and in the name of God put an end to 
to it, the priestess presiding at the orgies retreating by 
suicide into the lost world, her bleeding corpse found in 
her own bath-tub. May the eternal God have mercy on 
our cities. Gilded sin comes down from these high 
places into the upper circles of iniquity, and then on 
gradually down, until in five years it makes the whole 
pilgrimage, from the marble pillar on the brilliant 
avenue clear down to the cellars of Water street. The 
officer on that midnight exploration said to me: "Look 
at them now, and look at them three years from now 
when all this glory has departed; they'll be a heap of 
rags in the station-house." Another of the officers said 
tome: " That is the daughter of one of the wealthiest 
families on Madison square." 

But I have something more amazing to tell you than 
that the men of means and wealth support these haunts 
of iniquity, and that is that they are chiefly supported 
by heads of families — fathers and husbands, with the 
awful perjury of broken marriage vows upon them, with 
a niggardly stipend left at home for the support of their 
families, going forth with their thousands for the dia- 
monds and wardrobe and equipage of iniquity. In the 
name of heaven, I denounce this public iniquity. Let 
such men be hurled out of decent circles. Let them be 
hurled out from business circles. If they will not 
repent, overboard with them! I lift one-half the bur- 
den of malediction from the unpitied head of offending 
woman, and hurl it on the blasted pate of offending man! 
Society needs a new division of its anathema. By what 
law of justice does burning excoriation pursue offending 



32 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



woman down off the precipices of destruction, while 
offending man, kid-gloved, walks in refined circles, 
invited np if he have money, advanced into political 
recognition, while all the doors of high life open at the 
first rap of his gold-headed cane? I say, if you let one 
come back, let them both come back. If one must go 
down, let both go down. I give you as my opinion that 
the eternal perdition of all other sinners will be a heaven 
compared with the punishment everlasting of that man 
who, turning his back upon her whom he swore to pro- 
tect and defend until death, and upon his children, whose 
destiny may be decided by his example, goes forth to 
seek affectional alliances elsewhere. For such a man the 
portion will be fire, and hail, and tempest, and darkness, 
and blood, and anguish, and despair forever, forever, for- 
ever! My friends, there has got to be a reform in this 
matter, or American society will go to pieces. Under 
the head of "incompatibility of temper," nine-tenths of 
the abomination goes on. What did you get married 
for if your dispositions are incompatible? "Oh!" you 
say, "1 rushed into it without thought " Then you 
ought to be willing to sufi'er the punishment for making 
a fool of yourself! Incompatibility of temper! You 
are responsible for at least a half of the incompatibility 
Why are you not honest and willing to admit either that 
you did not control your temper, or that you had already 
broken your marriage oath ? In nineliundred and ninety- 
nine cases out of the thousand, incompatibility is a 
phrase to cover up wickedness already enacted. I declare 
in the presence of this city and in the presence of the 
world that heads of families are supporting these haunts 
of iniquity. I wish there might be c*. police raid lasting 
a great while, that they would just go down through all 
these places of sin and gather up all the prominent busi« 



THE LEPERS OF HiaH LIFE. 



33 



ness men of the city, and inarch them down through the 
street followed by about twenty reporters to take their 
names and put them in full capitals in the next day's 
paper! Let such a course be undertaken in our cities, 
and in six months there would be eighty per cent, off 
your public crime. It is not now the young men and 
the boys that need so much looking after; it is their 
fathers and mothers. Let heads of families cease to pat- 
ronize places of iniquity, and in a short time they would 
crumble to ruin. 

But you meet me with the question, "Why don't the 
city authorities put an end to such places of iniquity?" 
I answer in regard to Brooklyuj the work has already 
been done. Six years ago there were in the radius of 
your City Hall thirty-eight gambling saloons. They 
are all broken up. The ivory and wooden " chips " 
that came from the gambling-hells into the Police Head- 
quarters came in by the peck. How many inducements, 
were offered to our officials, such as: "This will be worth 
a thousand dollars to you if you will let it go on." "This 
will be worth five thousand if you will only let it go on." 
But our commissioners of police, mightier than any 
bribe, pursued their work until, while beyond the city 
limits there may be exceptions, within the city limits of 
Brooklyn there is not a gambling-hell, or policy-shop, 
or a house of death so pronounced. There are under- 
ground iniquities and hidden scenes, but none so pro- 
nounced. Every Monday morning all the captains of 
the police make reports in regard to their respective pre- 
cincts. When the work began, the police in authority 
at that time said: "Oh! it can't be done; we can't get 
into these places of iniquity to see them, and hence we 
can't break them up." "Then," said the commissioners 
of police, "break in the doors;" and it is astonishing how 



34 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



soon after tlie shoulders of a stout policeman ^oes against 
the door, it gets off its hinges. Some of the captains of 
police said : "This thing has been going on so long, it 
cannot be crushed." "Then," said the commissioners 
of police, "we'll get other captains of police." The 
work went on until now, if a reformer wants the com- 
missioners of police to show him the haunts of iniquity 
in Brooklyn, there are none to show him. If you know 
a single case that is an exception to what I say, report 
it to me at the close of this service at the foot of this 
platform, and I will warrant that within two hours after 
you report the case Commissioner Jourdan, Superin- 
tendent Campbell, Inspector Waddy, and as many of the 
twenty-five detectives and of the five hundred and fifty 
policemen as are necessary will come down on it like an 
Alpine avalanche. If you do not report it, it is because 
you are a coward, or else because you are in the sin your- 
self, and you do not want it shown up. You shall bear 
the whole responsibility, and it shall not be thrown on 
the hard-working and heroic detective and police force. 
But you say: "How has this general clearing out of 
gambling-hells and places of iniquity been accom- 
plished?'- Our authorities have been backed up by a 
high public sentiment. In a city which has on its judi- 
cial bench such magnificent men as Neilson, and 
Eeynolds, and McCue, and Moore, and Pratt, and others 
whom I am not fortunate enough to know, there must 
be a mighty impulse upward toward Grod and good mor- 
als. We have in the high places of this city men not 
only with great heads, but with great hearts. A young 
man disappeared from his father's house about the time 
the Brooklyn Theater burned, and it was supposed that 
he had been destroyed in that ruin. The father, broken- 
hearted, sold his property in Brooklvn„ and in desolation 



THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 



35 



left the city. Eecently the wandering son came back. 
He could not find his father, who, in departing, had 
given no idea of his destination. The case was reported 
to a man high in official position, and he sat down and 
wrote a letter to all the chiefs of police in the United 
States, in order that he might deliver that prodigal son 
into the arms of his broken-hearted father. A few days 
ago it was found that the father was in California. I 
understand that son is now on the way to meet him, and 
it will be the parable of the prodigal son over again 
when they embrace each other, and the father says: 
^'Rejoice with me, for this my son was dead and is alive 
again, was lost and is found." I have forgotten the 
name of the father, I have forgotten the name of his son ; 
but I have not forgotten the name of the officer whose 
sympathetic heart beats so loud under his badge of office. 
It was Patrick Campbell, Superintendent of the Brook- 
lyn police. I do not mention these things as a matter of 
city pride, nor as a matter of exultation, but of gratitude 
to God that Brooklyn to-day stands foremost among 
American cities in its freedom from places of iniquity. 
But Brooklyn has a large share of sin. Where do the 
people of Brooklyn go when they propose to commit 
abomination ? To 'New York. I was told in the mid- 
night exploration in ISTew York with the police that 
there are some places almost entirely supported by men 
and women from Brooklyn. We are one city after all — 
one now before the bridge is completed, to be more 
thoroughly one when the bridge is done. 

Well, then, you press me with another question : "Why 
don't the public authorities of New York extirpate these 
haunts of iniquity ?" Before I give you a definite answer 
I want to say that the obstacles in that city are greater 
than in any city on this continent. It is so vast. It is 



36 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



the landing-place of European immigration. Its wealth 
is mighty to establish and defend places of iniquity. 
Twice a year there are incursions of people from all 
parts of the land coming on the spring and the fall trade. 
It requires twenty times the municipal energy to keep 
order in ISTew York that it does in any city from Port- 
land to San Francisco. But still you pursue me with 
the question, and I am to answer it by telling you that 
there is infinite fault and immensity of blame to be 
divided between three parties. First, the police of New 
York city. So far as I know them they are courteous 
gentlemen. They have had great discouragement, they 
tell me, in the fact that when they arrest crime and 
bring it before the courts the witnesses will not appear 
lest they criminate themselves. They tell me also that 
they have been discouraged by the fact that so many 
suits have been brought against them for damages. But 
after all, my friends, they must take their share of blame. 
I have come to the conclusion, after much research and 
investigation, that there are captains of police in H^ew 
York who are in complicity with crime — men who 
make thousands of dollars a year for the simple 
fact that thej^ will not tell and will permit places of 
iniquity to stand month after month and year after year. 
I am told that there are captains of police in New York 
who get a percentage on every bottle of wine sold in the 
haunts of death, and that they get a revenue from all the 
shambles of sin. What a state of things this is ! In the 
Twenty-ninth precinct of New York there are one hun_ 
dred and twenty-one dens of death. Night after nighjt^ 
month after month, year after year, untouched. In West 
Twenty-sixth street and West Twenty-seventh street and 
West Thirty-first street there are whole blocks that are 
a pandemonium. There are between five and six hun- 



THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE, 37 



dred dens of darkness in the city of New York, where 
there are 2,500 policemen. Not long ago there was a 
masquerade ball in which the masculine and feminine 
offenders of society were the participants, and some of 
the police danced in the masquerade and distributed the 
prizes! There is the grandest opportunity that has ever 
opened for any American open now. It is for that man 
in high official position who shall get into his stirrups 
and say, " Men, follow?" and who shall in one night 
sweep around and take all of these leaders of iniquity, 
whether on suspicion or on positive proof, saying, " I'll 
take the responsibility, come on! I put my private 
property and my political aspirations and my life into 
this crusade against the powers of darkness." That man 
would be Mayor of the city of New York. That man 
would be fit to be President of the United States. 

But the second part of the blame I must put at the 
door of the District Attorney of New York. I under- 
stand he is an honorable gentleman, but he has not time 
to attend to all these cases. Literally, there are thousands 
of cases unpursued for lack of time. Now, I say, it is 
the business of New York to give assistants, and clerks, 
and help to the District Attorney until all these places 
shall go down in quick retribution. 

Bat the third part of the blame, and the heaviest part 
of it, I put on the moral and Christian people of our 
cities, who are guilty of most culpable indifference on 
this whole subject. When Tweed stole his millions 
large audiences were assembled in indignation, Charles 
O'Conor was retained, committees of safety and investi- 
gation were appointed, and a great stir made; but night 
by night there is a theft and a burglary of city morals 
as much worse than Tweed's robberies as his were worse 
than common shop-lifting, and it has very little opposi- 



38 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



tion. I tell you what New York wants ; it wants indig- 
nation meetings in Cooper Institute and Academy? of 
Music and Chickering and Irving Halls to compel the 
public authorities to do their work and to send the police, 
with clubs and lanterns and revolvers, to turn off the 
colored lights of the dance-houses, and to mark for con- 
fiscation the trunks and wardrobes and furniture and 
scenery, and to gather up all the keepers, and all the in- 
mates, and all the patrons, and march them out to the 
Tombs, fife and drum sounding the Eogue's March. 

"While there are men smoking their cigarettes, with 
their feet on Turkish divans, shocked that a minister of 
religion should explore and expose the iniquity of city 
life, there are raging underneath our great cities a Coto- 
paxi, a Stromboli, a Vesuvius, ready to bury us in ashes 
and scoria deeper than that which whelmed Pompeii and 
Herculaneum. Oh! I wish the time would come for the 
plowshare of public indignation to push through and 
rip up and turn under those parts of I^ew York which 
are the plague of the nation. I^ow is the time to hitch 
up the team to this plowshare. In this time, when Mr. 
Cooper is Mayor, and Mr. Kelly is Comptroller, and Mr. 
Nichols is Police Commissioner, and Superintendent 
Walling wears the badge of office, and there is on the 
judi-cM benches of New York an array of the best men 
that have ever occupied those positions since the founda- 
tion of the city — Recorder Hackett, Police Magistrates 
Kilbreth, Wandell, Morgan and Duffy ; such men as 
Gildersleeve, and Sutherland, and Davis, and Curtis ; 
and on the United States Court bench in New York 
such men as Benedict, and Blatchford, and Choate — now 
is the time to make an extirpation of iniquity. Now is 
the time for a great crusade, and for the people of our cities 
in great public assemblages to say to police authority: 



THE LEPERS OF HIGH LIFE. 



39 



" Go ahead, and we will back you with our lives, our for- 
tunes, and our sacred honor." 

I must adjourn until next Sabbath morning much of 
what [I wanted to say about certain forms of iniquity 
which I saw rampant in the night of my exploration 
with the city officials. But before I stop this morning 
I want to have one word with a class of men with whom 
people have so little patience that they never get a kind 
word of invitation. I mean the men who have forsaken 
their homes. Oh! my brother, return. You say: "I 
can't ; I have no home ; my home is broken up." Re- 
establish your home. It has been done in other cases, 
why may it not be done in your case'^ " Oh," you say, 
" we parted for life ; we have divided our property ; we 
have divided our effects." I ask you, did you divide the 
marriage ring of that bright day when you etarted life 
together ? Did you divide your family Bible? If so, 
where did you divide it'^ Across the Old Testament, 
where the Ten Commandments denounce your sin, or 
across the New Testament, where Christ says : Blessed 
are the pure in heart? " Or did you divide it between 
the Old and the New Testaments, right across the family 
record of weddings and births and deaths ? Did you 
divide the cradle in which you rocked your first born? 
Did you divide the little grave in the cemetery, over 
which you stood with linked arms, looking down in awful 
bereavement? Above all, I ask you, did you divide your 
hope for heaven, so that there is no full hope left for 
either of yon? Go back! There maybe a great gulf 
between you and once happy domesticity; but Christ 
will bridge that gulf. It may be a bridge of sighs. Turn 
toward it. Put your foot on the over-arching span. 
Hear it ! It is a voice unrolling from the throne: " He 
that overcometh shall inherit all things, and I will be 



40 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



unto him a God, and he shall be my son ; but the un- 
believing, and the sorcerers, and the whoremongers, and 
the adulterers, and the idolators, and all liars shall have 
their part in the lake which bnrneth with fire and brim- 
stone — which is the second deathT' 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



41 



CHAPTER III. 

THE GATES OF HELL. 

"The gates of hell shall not prevail against it. "-St. Matthew xvi : 18. 

It is only 10 o'clock," said the officer of the law, as 
we got into the carriage for the midnight exploration — 
" it is only 10 o'clock, and it is too early to see the places 
that we wish to see, for the theaters have not yet let out." 
I said, " What do yon mean by that ?" "Well," he said, 
" the places of iniquity are not in full blast until the 
people have time to arrive from the theaters." So we 
loitered on, and the officer told the driver to stop on a 
street where is one of the costliest and most brilliant 
gambling-houses in the city of New York. As we came 
up in front all seemed dark. The blinds were down ; 
the door was guarded ; but after a whispering of the 
officer with the guard at the door, we were admitted into 
the hall, and thence into the parlors, around one table 
finding eight or ten men in mid-life, well-dressed — all 
the work going on in silence, save the noise of the 
rattling " chips " on the gaming-table in one parlor, and 
the revolving ball of the roulette table in the other par- 
lor. Some of these men, we were told, had served terms 
in prison; some were ship-wrecked bankers and brokers 
and money-dealers, and some were going their first 
rounds of vice — but all intent upon the table, as large or 
small fortunes moved up and down before them. Oh! 
there was something awfully solemn in the silence — the 
intense gaze, the suppressed emotion of the players. No 



42 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



one looked up. They all had money in the rapids, and 
I have no doubt some saw, as they sat there, horses and 
carriages, and houses and lands, and home and family 
rushing down into the vortex. A man's life would not 
have been worth a farthing in that presence had he not 
been accompanied by the police, if he had been supposed 
to be on a Christian errand of observation. Some of 
these men went by private key, some went in by careful 
introduction, some were taken in by the patrons of the 
establishment. The officer of the law told me: " i^^one 
get in here except by police mandate, or by some letter 
of a patron." While we were there a young man came 
in, put his money down on the roulette-table, and lost ; 
put more money down on the roulette-table, and lost ; 
put more money down on the roulette- table, and lost; 
then feeling in his pockets for more money, finding none, 
in severe silence he turned his back upon the scene and 
passed out. All the literature about the costly magnifi- 
cence of such places is untrue. Men kept their hats on 
and smoked, and there was nothing in the upholstery or 
the furniture to forbid. While we stood there men lost 
their property and lost their souls. Oh! merciless place. 
Not once in all the history of that gaming-house has 
there been one word of sympathy uttered for the losers 
at the game. Sir Horace Walpole said that a man 
dropped dead in front of one of the club-houses of Lon- 
don; his body was carried into the club-house, and the 
members of the club began immediately to bet as to 
whether he were dead or alive, and when it was proposed 
to test the matter by bleeding him, it was only hindered 
by the suggestion that it would be unfair to some of the 
players! In these gaming-houses ofour cities, men have 
their property wrung away from them, and then they 
go out, some of them to drown their grief in strong 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



43 



drink, some to ply the counterfeiter's pen, and so restore 
their fortunes, some resort to the suicide's revolver, but 
all going down, and that work proceeds day by day, and 
night by night, until it is estimated that every day in 
Christendom eighty million dollars pass from hand to 
hand through gambling practices, and every year in 
Christendom one hundred and twenty-three billion, one 
hundred million dollars change hands in that way. 

" But," I said, " it is 11 o'clock, and we must be off." 
We passed out into the hallway and so into the street, 
the burly guard slamming the door of the house after us, 
and we got into the carriage and rolled on toward the 
gates of hell. You know about the gates of heaven. 
You have often heard them preached about. There are 
three to each point of the compass. On the north, three 
gates; on the south, three gates; on the east, three 
gates ; on the west, three gates ; and each gate is of solid 
pearl. Oh ! gate of heaven ; may we all get into it. But 
who shall describe the gates of hell spoken of in my text? 
These gates are burnished until they sparkle and glisten 
in the gas-light. They are mighty, and set in sockets 
of deep and dreadful masonry. They are high, so that 
those who are in may not clamber over and get out. 
They are heavy, but they swing easily in to let those go 
, in who are to be destroyed. Well, my friends, it is 
always safe to go where God tells you to go, and God 
had told me to go through these gates of hell, and ex- 
plore and report, and, taking three of the high police 
authorities and two of the elders of my church, I went 
in, and I am here this morning to sketch the gates of 
hell. I remember, when the Franco-German war was 
going on, that I stood one day in Paris looking at the 
gates of the Tuileries, and I was so absorbed in the sculp- 
turing at the top of the gates — the masonry and the 



44 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



bronze — that I forgot myself, and after awhile, looking 
down, I saw that there were officers of the law scrutinizing 
me, supposing, no doubt, I was a Grerman, and looking 
at those gates for adverse purposes. But, my friends, 
we shall not stand looking at the outside of the gates of 
hell. Through this midnight exploration I shall tell 
you of both sides, and I shall tell you what those gates 
are made of. With the hammer of G-od's truth I shall 
pound on the brazen panels, and with the lantern of 
God's truth I shall flash a light upon the shining 
hinges. 

Gate the first: Impure literature. Anthony Com- 
stock seized twenty tons of bad books, plates, and letter- 
press, and when our Professor Cochran, of the Poly- 
technic Institute, poured the destructive acids on those 
plates, they smoked in the righteous annihilation. And 
yet a great deal of the bad literature of the day is not 
gripped of the law. It is strewn in your parlors; it is 
n your libraries. Some of your children read it at night 
after they have retired, the gas-burner swung as near as 
possible to their pillow. Much of this literature is un- 
der the title of scientific information. A book agent 
with one of these infernal books, glossed over with scien- 
tific nomenclature, went into a hotel and sold in one day 
a hundred copies, and sold them all to women! It is 
appalling that men and women who can get through 
their family physician all the useful information they 
may need, and without any contamination, should wade 
chin deep through such accursed literature under the 
plea of getting useful knowledge, and that printing- 
presses, hoping to be called decent, lend themselves to 
this infamy. Fathers and mothers, be not deceived by 
the title, "medical works." Nine- tenths of those books 
come hot from the lost world, though they may have on 



THE GATES OF HELI.. 



45 



them the names of the publishing-houses of New York 
and Philadelphia. Then there is all the novelette litera- 
ture of the day flung over the land by the million. As 
there are good novels that are long, so I suppose there 
may be good novels that are short, and so there may be 
a- good novelette, but it is the exception. 'No one — mark 
this — no one systematically reads the average novelette 
of this day and keeps either integrity or virtue. The 
most of these novelettes are written by broken-down 
literary men for small compensation, on the principle 
that, having failed in literature elevated and pure, they 
hope to succeed in the tainted and the nasty. Oh! this 
is a wide gate of heli. Every panel is made out of a bad 
book or newspaper. Every hinge is the interjoined type 
of a corrupt printing-press. Every bolt or lock of that 
gate is made out of the plate of an unclean pictorial. In 
other words, there are a million men and women in the 
United States to-day reading themselves into hell ! "When 
in your own beautiful city a prosperous family fell into 
ruins through the misdeeds of one of its members, the 
amazed mother said to the officer of the law: Why, I 
never supposed there was anything wrong. I never 
thought there could be anything wrong." Then she sat 
weeping in silence for some time, and said : " Oh ! I 
have got it now! I know, I know! I found in her 
bureau after she went away a bad book. That's what 
slew her." These leprous booksellers have gathered up 
the catalogues of all the male and female seminaries in 
the United States, catalogues containing the names and 
the residences of all the students, and circulars of death 
are sent to every one, without any exception. Can you 
imagine anything more deathful? There is not a young 
person, male or female, or an old person, who has not 
had offered to him or her a bad book or a bad picture. 



46 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



Scour your house to find out whether there are any of 
these adders coiled on your parlor center-table, or coiled 
amid the toilet set on the dressing-case. I adjure you 
before the sun goes down to explore your family libraries 
with an inexorable scrutiny. Remember that one bad 
book or bad picture may do the work for eternity. I 
want to arouse all your suspicions about novelettes. I 
want to put you on the watch against everything that 
may seem like surreptitious correspondence through the 
postoffice. I want you to understand that impure litera- 
ture is one of the broadest, highest, mightiest gates of 
the lost. 

Gate the second: The dissolute dance. You shall not 
divert me to the general subject of dancing. "Whatever 
you may think of the parlor dance, or the methodic mo- 
tion of the body to sounds of music in the family or 
the social circle, I am not now discussing that question. 
I want you to unite with me this morning in recogniz- 
ing the fact that there is a dissolute dance. You know 
of what I speak. It is seen not only in the low haunts 
of death, but in elegant mansions. It is the first step to 
eternal ruin for a great multitude of both sexes. You 
know, my friends, what postures, and attitudes, and fig- 
ures are suggested of the devil. They who glide into 
the dissolute dance glide over an inclined plane, and the 
dance is swifter and swifter, wilder and wilder, until 
with the speed of lightning they whirl off the edges of 
a decent life into a fiery future. This gate of hell swings 
across the Axminster of many a fine parlor, and across 
the ball-room of the summer watering-place. You have 
no right, my brother, my sister — you have no right to 
take an attitude to the sound of music which would be 
unbecoming in the absence of music. 'No Chickering 
grand of city parlor or fiddle of mountain picnic can 
consecrate that which Grod hath cursed. 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



47 



Gate the third: Indiscreet apparel. The attire of 
woman for the last four or five years has been beautiful 
and graceful beyond anything I have known; but there 
are those who will always carry that which is right into 
the extraordinary and indiscreet. I am told that there 
is a fashion about to come in upon us that is shocking 
to all righteousness. I charge Christian women, neither 
by style of dress nor adjustment of apparel, to become 
administrative of evil. Perhaps none else will dare to 
tell you, so I will tell you that there are multitudes of 
men who owe their eternal damnation to the boldness 
of womanly attire. Show me the fashion-plates of any 
age between this and the time of Louis XYI., of France, 
and Henry YIII., of England, and I will tell you the 
type of morals or immorals of that age or that year. 
'No exception to it. Modest apparel means a righteous 
people. Immodest apparel always means a contaminated 
and depraved society. You wonder that the city of Tyre 
was destroyed with such a terrible destruction. Have 
you ever seen the fashion-plate of the city of Tyre? I 
will show it to you: 

" Moreover, the Lord saith, because the daughters of Zion are 
haughty and walk with stretched-forth necks and wanton eyes, w^alk- 
ing and mincing as they go, and making a tinkling with their feet, 
in that day the Lord will take away the bravery of their tinkling 
ornaments about their feet, and their cauls, and their round tires like 
the moon, the rings and nose jewels, the changeable suits of apparel, 
and the mantles, and the wimples, and the crisping-pins." 

That is the fashion-plate of ancient Tyre. And do 
you wonder that the Lord G-od in His indignation 
blotted out the city, so that fishermen to-day spread their 
nets where that city once stood? 

Gate the fourth: Alcoholic beverage. In our mid- 
night exploration we saw that all the scenes of wicked- 
ness were under the enchantment of the wine-cup. That 



48 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



was what the waitresses carried on the platter. That 
was what glowed on the table. That was what shone in 
illuminated gardens. That was what flushed the cheeks 
of the patrons who came in. That was what staggered 
the step of the patrons as they went out. Oh! the wine- 
cup is the patron of impurity. The officers of the law 
that night told us that nearly all the men who go into 
the shambles of death go in intoxicated, the mental and 
the spiritual abolished that the brute may triumph. 
Tell me that a young man drinks, and I know the whole 
story. If he become a captive of the wine-cup, he will 
become a captive of all other vices; only give him time. 
No one ever runs drunkenness alone. That is a car- 
rion-crow that goes in a flock, and when you see that 
beak ahead, you may know the other beaks are coming. 
In other words, the wine-cup unbalances and dethrones 
one's better judgment, and leaves one the prey of all evil 
appetites that may choose to alight upon his soul. 
There is not a place of any kind of sin in the United 
States to-day that does not find its chief abettor in the 
chalice of inebriacy. There is either a drinking-bar 
before, or one behind, or one above, or one underneath. 
The officers of the law said to me that night: "These 
people escape legal penalty because they are all licensed 
to sell liquor." Then I said within myself, " The courts 
that license the sale of strong drink license gambling- 
houses, license libertinism, license disease, license death, 
license all sufferings, all crimes, all despoliations, all 
disasters, all murders, all woe. It is the courts and the 
Legislature that are swinging wide open this grinding, 
creaky, stupendous gate of the lost." 

But you say, "You have described these gates of hell 
and shown us how they swing in to allow the entrance 
of the doomed. Will you not, please, before you get 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



49 



through the sermon, tell us how these gates of hell may 
swing out to allow the escape of the penitent?" I reply, 
but very few escape. Of the thousand that go in nine 
hundred and ninety-nine perish. Suppose one of these 
wanderers should knock at your door, would you admit 
her? Suppose you knew where she came from, would 
you ask her to sit down at your dining- table? Would 
you ask her to become the governess of your children? 
Would you introduce her among your acquaintanceships? 
Would you take the responsibility of pulling on the out- 
side of the gate of hell while she pushed on the inside of 
that gate trying to get out'? You would not, not one of 
a thousand of you that would dare to do it. You write 
beautiful poetry over her sorrows and weep over her 
misfortunes, but give her practical help you never will. 
There is not one person out of a thousand that will — 
there is not one out of five thousand that has — come so 
near the heart of the Lord Jesus Christ as to dare to 
help one of these fallen souls. But you say, "Are there 
no ways by which the wanderer may escape?" Oh, yes; 
three or four. The one way is the sewing-girl's garret, 
dingy, cold, hunger-blasted. But you say, "Is there no 
other way for her to escape?" Oh, yes. Another way 
is the street that leads to the East river, at midnight, the 
end of the city dock, the moon shining down on the 
water making it look so smooth she wonders if it is deep 
enough. It is. ]^o boatman near enough to hear the 
plunge. No watchman near enough to pick her out 
before she sinks the third time. ]No other way? Yes. 
By the curve of the Hudson River Railroad at the point 
where the engineer of the lightning express train cannot 
see a hundred yards ahead to the form that lies across 
the track. He may whistle "down brakes," but not soon 
enough to disappoint the one who seeks her death. But 
4 



60 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



you say, "Isn't God good, and won't lie forgive?" Yes; 
but man will not, woman will not, society will not. The 
church of God says it will, but it will not. Our work, 
then, must be prevention rather than cure. Standing here 
telling this story to-day, it is not so much in the hope that 
I will persuade one who has dashed down a thousand 
feet over the rocks to crawl up again into life and light, 
but it is to alarm those who are coming too near the 
edges. Have you ever listened to hear the lamentation 
that rings up from those far depths ? 

"Once I was pure as the snow, but I fell, 
Fell like a snowflake, from heaven to hell ; 
Fell, to be trampled as filth of the street ; 
Fell, to be scoffed at, be spit on, and beat. 
Pleading, cursing, begging to die. 
Selling my soul to whoever would buy ; 
Dealing in shame for a morsel of bread, 
Hating the living and fearing the dead." 

But you say. "What can be the practical use of this 
course of sermons?" I say, much everywhere. I am 
greatly obliged to those gentlemen of the press who have 
fairly reported what I have said on these occasions, and 
the press of this city and New York, and of the other 
prominent cities. I thank you for the almost universal 
fairness with which you have presented what I have had 
to say. Of course, among the educated and refined 
journalists who sit at these tables, and have been sitting 
here for four or five years, there will be a fool or two 
that does not understand his business, but that ought 
not to discredit the grand newspaper printing-press. I 
thank also, those who have by letters cheered me in this 
work — letters coming from all parts of the land, from 
Christian reformers telling me to go on in the work 
which I have undertaken. J^ever so many letters in my 
life have 1 received. Perhaps one out of the hundred 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



51 



conaemnatory, as one I got yesterday from a man who 
said he thought my sermons would do great damage in 
the fact that they would arouse the suspicion of domestic 
circles as to where the head of the family was spending 
his evenings! I was sori-y it was an anonymous letter^ 
for I should have written to that man's wife telling her 
to put a detective on her husband's track, for I knew 
right away he was going to bad places ! My friends, 
you say, It is not possible to do anything with these 
stalwart iniquities; you cannot wrestle them down." 
Stupid man, read my text: "The gates of hell shall not 
prevail against the church." Those gates of hell are to 
be prostrated just as certainly as God and the Bible are 
true^ but it will not be done until Christian men and 
women, quitting their pruaery and squeamishness in 
this matter, rally the whole Christian sentiment of the 
church and assail these great evils of society. The Bible 
utters its denunciation in this direction again and again, 
and yet the piety of the day is such a namby-pamby, 
emetic sort of a thing that you cannot even quote Scrip- 
ture without making somebody restless. As long as 
this holy imbecility reigns in the church of God, sin will 
laugh you to scorn. I do not know but that before the 
church wakes up matters will get worse and worse, and 
that there will have to be one lamb sacrificed from each 
of the most carefully-guarded folds, and the wave of 
uncleanness dash to the spire of the village church and 
the top of the cathedral pillar. Prophets and patriarchs^ 
and apostles and evangelists,and Christ himself have thun- 
dered against these sins as against no other, and yet there 
are those who think we ought to take, when we speak of 
these subjects, a tone apologetic. I put my foot on all 
the conventional rhetoric on this subject, and I tell you 
plainly that unless you give up that sin your doom is 



52 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



sealed, and world without end you will be chased by the 
anathemas of an incensed G-od. I rally you under the 
cheerful prophecy of the text; I rally you to a besiege- 
ment of the gates of hell. We want in this besieg- 
ing host no soft sentimentalists, but men who are willing 
to give and take hard knocks. The gates of Gaza were 
carried off, the gates of Thebes were battered down, the 
gates of Babylon were destroyed, and the gates of hell 
are going to be prostrated. The Christianized printing- 
press will be rolled up as the chief battering-ram. Then 
there will be a long list of aroused pulpits, which shall 
be assailing fortresses, and God's red-hot truth shall be 
the flying ammunition of the contest; and the sappers 
and the miners will lay the train under these foundations 
of sin, and at just the right time God, who leads on the 
fray, will cry, " Down with the gates!" and the explo- 
sion beneath will be answered by all the trumpets of God 
on high celebrating universal victory. But there may be 
in this house one wanderer that would like to have a 
kind word calling homeward, and I cannot sit down until 
I have uttered that word. I have told you that society 
has no mercy. Did I hint, at an earlier point in this 
subject, that God will have mercy upon any wanderer 
who would like to come back to the heart of infinite 
love? 

A cold Christmas night in a farm-house. Father 
comes in from the barn, knocks the snow from his shoes, 
and sits down by the fire. The mother sits at the stand 
knitting. She says to him : " Do you remember it is 
anniversary to-night?" The father is angered. He never 
wants any allusion to the fact that one had gone away, 
and the mere suggestion that it was the anniversary of 
that sad event made him quite rough, although the tears 
ran down his cheeks. The old house-dog, that had played 



THE GATES OF HELL. 



53 



with the wanderer when she was a child, came up and 
put his head on the old man's knee, but he roughly 
repulsed the dog. He wants nothing to remind him of 
the anniversary day. 

A cold winter night in a city church. It is Christmas 
night. They have been decorating the sanctuary. A lost 
wanderer of the street, with thin shawl about her, at- 
tracted by the warmth and light, comes in and sits near 
the door. The minister of religion is preaching of Him 
who was wounded for our transgressions, and bruised for 
our iniquities, and the poor soul by the door said: "Why, 
that must mean me ; ' mercy for the chief of sinners ; 
bruised for our iniquities ; wounded for our transgres- 
sions.' " The music that night in the sanctuary brought 
back the old hymn which she used to sing when with 
father and mother she worshiped God in the village 
church. The service over, the minister went down the 
aisle. She said to him : " Were those words for me ? 
^Wounded for our transgressions.' Was that for me?" 
The man of God understood her not. He knew not 
how to comfort a shipwrecked soul, and he passed on and 
he passed out. The poor wanderer followed into the 
street. "What are you doing here, Meg?" said the 
police. " What are you doing here to-night?" "Oh!" 
she replied, " I was in to warm myself;" and then the 
rattling cough came, and she held to the railing until 
the paroxysm was over. She passed on down the street, 
falling from exhaustion ; recovering herself again, until 
after a while she reached the outskirts of the city and 
passed on into the country road. It seemed so familiar, 
she kept on the road, and she saw in the distance a light 
jn the window. Ah ! that light had been gleaming there 
every night since she went away. On that country 
i*oad she passed until she came to the garden gate. She 



54 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



opened it and passed up the path where she played in 
childhood. She came to the steps and looked in at the 
fire on the hearth. Then she put her fingers to the latch. 
Oh! if that door had been locked she would have per- 
ished on the threshold, for she was near to death. But 
that door had not been locked since the time she went 
away. She pushed open the door. She went in and laid 
down on the hearth by the fire. The old house-dog 
growled as he saw her enter, but there was something in 
the voice he recognized, and he frisked about her until 
he almost pushed her down in his joy. In the morning 
the mother came down, and she saw a bundle. of rags on 
the hearth ; but when the face was uplifted, she knew it, 
and it was no more old Meg of the street. Throwing 
her arms around the returned prodigal, she cried, "Oh! 
Maggie." The child threw her arms around her mother's 
neck, and said: "Oh! Mother," and while they were 
embraced a rugged form towered above them. It was 
the father. The severity all gone out of his face, he 
stooped and took her up tenderly and carried her to 
mother's room, and laid her down on mother's bed, for 
she was dying. Then the lost one, looking up into her 
mother's face, said : " 'Wounded for our transgressions 
and bruised for our iniquities !" Mother, do you think 
that means me ?" " Oh, yes, my darling," said the 
mother, " if mother is so glad to get you back, don't you 
think Grod is glad to get you back?" And there she 
lay dying, and all her dreams and all her prayers were 
filled with the words, ''Wounded for our transgressions, 
bruised for our iniquities," until just before the moment 
of her departure, her face lighted up, showing the pardon 
of God had dropped upon her soul. And there she slept 
away on the bosom of a pardoning Jesus. So the Lord 
took back one whom the world rejected. 



WHOM I SAW, AND AVHOM I MISSED. 



55 



CHAPTER lY. 
WHOM I SAW AND WHOM I MISSED. 

"And the vale of Siddim was full of slime-pits."— Genesis xiv: 10. 

About six months a^o, a gentleman in Augusta, Geor- 
gia, wrote me asking me to preach from this text, and 
the time has come for the subject. The neck of an army 
had been broken by falling into these half-hidden slime- 
pits. How deep they were, or how vile, or how hard to 
get out of, we are not told; but the whole scene is so far 
distant in the past that we have not half as much inter- 
est in this statement of the text as we have in the 
announcement that our American cities are full of slime- 
pits, and tens of thousands of people are falling in them 
night by night. Recently, in the name of God, I ex- 
plored some of these slime-pits. Why did I do so ? In 
April last^ seated in the editorial rooms of one of the 
chief daily newspapers of. I^ew York, the editor said to 
me: ^'Mr. Talmage, you clergymen are at great disad- 
vantage when you come to battle iniquity, for you don't 
know what you are talking about, and we laymen are 
aware of the fact that you don't know of what you are 
talking; now, if you would like to make a personal inves- 
tigation, I will see that you shall get the highest official 
escort." I thanked him, accepted the invitation, and 
told him that this autumn I would begin the tour. The 
fact was that I had for a long time wanted to say some 
words of warning and invitation to the young men of 
this country, and I felt if my course of sermons was 
preceded by a tour of this sort I should not only be bet- 



56 



NIGH'l SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



ter acquainted with the subject, but I should have the 
whole country for an audience; and it has been a delib- 
erate plan of my ministry, whenever I am going to try 
to do anything especial for Grod, or hum'anity, or the 
church, to do it in such a way that the devil will always 
advertise it free gratis for nothing! That was the reason 
I gave two weeks' previous notice of my pulpit inten- 
tions. The result has been satisfactory. 

Standing within those purlieus of death, under the 
command of the police and in their company, I was as 
much surprised at the people whom I missed as at the 
people whom I saw. I saw bankers there, and brokers 
there, and merchants there, and men of all classes and 
occupations who have leisure, there; but there was one 
class of persons that I missed. I looked for them all 
up and down the galleries, and amid the illumined 
gardens, and all up and down the staircases of death. 
I saw not one of them. I mean the hard-working classes, 
the laboring classes, of our great cities. You tell me 
they could not afford to go there. They could. Entrance, 
twenty-five cents. They could have gone there if they 
had a mind to; but the simple fact is that hard work is 
a friend to good morals. The men who toil from early 
morn until late at night when they go home are tired 
out, and want to sit down and rest, or to saunter out with 
their families along the street, or to pass into some quiet 
place of amusement where they will not be ashamed- to 
take wife or daughter. The busy populations of these 
cities are the moral populations. I observed on the 
night of our exploration that the places of dissipation 
are chiefly supported by the men who go to business at 
9 and 10 o'ciock in the morning and get through at 3 
and 4 in the afternoon. They have plenty of time to go 
to destruction in and plenty of money to buy a through 



WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSET>. 57 

ticket on the Grand Trunk Eailroad to perdition, stop- 
ping at no depot until they get to the eternal smash-up! 
Those are the fortunate and divinely-blessed young men 
who have to breakfast early and take supper late, and 
have the entire interregnum filled up with work that blis- 
ters the hands, and makes the legs ache and the brain 
weary. There is no chance for the morals of that young 
man who has plenty of money and no occupation. You 
may go from Central Park to the Battery, or you may 
go from Fulton Street Ferry, Brooklyn, out to South 
Bushwick, or out to Hunter's Pointy or out to Gowanus, 
and you will not find one young, man of that kind who 
has not already achieved his ruin, or who is not on the 
way thereto at the rate of sixty miles the hour. Those are 
not the favored and divinely-blessed young men who 
come and go as they will, and who have their pocket- 
case full of the best cigars, and who dine at Delmonico's, 
and who dress in the tip- top of fashion, their garments 
a little tighter or looser or broader striped than others, 
their mustaches twisted with stiffer cosmetic, and their 
hair redolent with costly pomatum, and have their hat 
set farthest over on the right ear, and who have boots 
fitting the foot with exquisite torture, and who have 
handkerchief soaked with musk, and patchouli, and white 
rose, and new-mown hay, and "balm of a thousand flow- 
ers;" but those are the fortunate young men who have 
to work hard for a living. Give a young man plenty of 
wines, and plenty of cigars, and plenty of fine horses, 
and Satan has no anxiety about that man's coming out 
at his place. He ceases to watch him, only giving direc- 
tions about his reception when he shall arrive at the end 
of the journey. If, on the night of our exploration, I 
had called the roll of all the laboring men of these cities, 
I would have received no answer, for the simple reason. 



58 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



they were not there to answer. I was not more surprised 
at the people whom I saw there than I was surprised at 
the people whom I missed. Oh! man, if you have an 
occupation by which you are wearied every night of your 
life, thank God, for it is the mightiest preservative 
against evil. 

But by that time the clock of old Trinity Church was 
striking one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 
ten, eleven, twelve — midnight ! And with the police and 
two elders of my church we sat down at the table in the 
galleries and looked off upon the vortex of death. The 
music in full blast; the dance in wildest whirl; the wine 
foaming to the lip of the glass. Midnight on earth is 
midnoon in hell. All the demons of the pit were at 
that moment holding high carnival. The blue calcium 
light suggested the burning brimstone of the pit. Seated 
there, at that hour, in that awful place, you ask me, as I 
have frequently been asked, "What were the emotions 
that went through your heart?" And I shall give the 
rest of my morning's sermon to telling you how I felt. 

First of all, as at no death-bed or railroad disaster did 
I feel an overwhelming sense of pity. Why were we 
there as Christian explorers, while those lost souls were 
there as participators ? If they had enjoyed the same 
healthful and Christian surroundings which we have had 
all our days, and we had been thrown amid the contamin- 
ations which have destroyed them, the case would have 
been the reverse, and they would have been the specta- 
tors and we the actors in that awful tragedy of the 
damned. As I sat there I could not keep back the 
tears — tears of gratitude to God for his protecting 
grace — tears of compassion for those who had fallen so 
low. The difference in moral navigation had been the 
difference in the way the wind blew. The wind of temp- 



WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 



59 



tation drove them on the rocks. The wind of God's 
mercy drove ns out on a fair sea. There are men and 
women so merciless in their criticism of the fallen that 
you might think that God had made them in an especial 
mold, and that they have no capacity for evil, and yet if 
they had been subjected to the same allurements, instead 
of stopping at the up-town haunts of iniquity, they 
would at this hour have been wallowing amid the hor- 
rors of Arch Block, or shrieking with delirium tremens 
in the cell of a police station. Instead of boasting over 
your purity and your integrity and your sobriety, you 
had better be thanking God for his grace, lest some time 
the Lord should let you loose and you find out how 
much better you are than others naturally. I will take 
the best-tempered man in this house, the most honest 
man in this city, and I will venture the opinion in regard 
to him that, surround him with, all the adequate circum- 
stances of temptation, and the Lord let him loose, he 
would become a thief, a gambler, a sot, a rake, a wharf- 
rat. Instead of boasting over our superiority, and over 
the fact that there is no capacity in us of evil, I would 
rather have for my epitaph that one word which Duncan 
Matthewson, the Scotch evangelist, ordered chiseled on 
his tombstone, the name, and the one word, "Kepf 

Again: Seated in that gallery of death, and looking 
out on that maelstrom of iniquity, I thought to myself, 
"There! that young man was once the pride of the city 
home. Paternal care watched him ; maternal love bent 
over him ; sisterly affection surrounded him. He was 
once taken to the altar and consecrated in the name 
of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy 
Ghost; but he went away. This very moment,'* 
I thought to myself, " there are hearts aching for that 
young man's return. Father and mother are sitting up 



60 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



for him.'' You say, *'He lias a night-key, and he can 
^et in without their help. Why do not those parents 
go sound to sleep?" What! Is there any sleep for 
parents who suspect a son is drifting up and down amid 
tbe dissipations of a great city? They may weep, tbey 
may pray, they may wring their hands, but sleep they 
cannot. Ah ' they have done and suffered too much for 
that boy to give him up now. They turn up the light 
and look at the photograph of him when he was young 
and untempted. They stand at the window to see if he 
is coming up the street. They hear the watchman's 
rattle, but no sound of returning boy. I felt that night 
as if I could put my hand on the shoulder of that young 
map, and, with a voice that would sound all through 
those temples of sin, say to him, Go home, young man; 
your father is waiting for you. Your mother is waiting 
for you God is waiting for you. All heaven is wait- 
ing for you. Go home! By the tears wept over your 
waywardness, by the prayers offered for your salvation, 
by the midnight watching over you when you had scarlet 
fever and diphtheria, by the blood of the Son of God, by 
the judgment day when you must give answer for what 
you have been doing here to-night, go home!" But Idid 
not say this, lest it interfere with my work, and I waited 
to get on this platform, where, perhaps, instead of saving 
one young man, God helping me, I might save a thousand 
young men; and the cry of alarm which I suppressed 
that night, I let loose to-day in the hearing of this 
people. 

Seated in that gallery of death, and looking off upon 
the destruction, T bethought myself also, " These are 
the fragments of broken homes." A home is a com- 
plete thing, and if one member of it wander off, then the 
home is broken. And sitting tliere, I said: "Here they 



WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 



61 



are, broken family altars, broken wedding-rings, broken 
VOWS, broken anticipations, broken hearts." And, as I 
looked off, the dance became wilder and more unre- 
strained, until it seemed as if the floor broke through 
and the revelers were plunged into a depth from which 
they may never rise, and all these broken families came 
around the brink and seemed to cry out: " Come back, 
father! Come back, mother! Come back, my son! Come 
back, my daughter ! Come back, my sister !" But no voices 
returned, and the sound of the feet of the dancers grew 
fainter and fainter, and stopped, and there was thick 
darkness. And I said, "What does all this mean?" 
And there came up a great hiss of whispering voices, 
saying, " This is the second death !" 

But seated there that night, looking off upon that 
scene of death, I bethought myself also, This is only a 
miserable copy of European dissipations." In London 
they have what they call the Argyle, the Cremorne, the 
Strand, the beer-gardens, and a thousand places of 
infamy, and it seems to be the ambition of bad people 
in this country to copy those foreign dissipations. Toady- 
ism when it bows to foreign pretense and to foreign 
equipage and to foreign title is despicable; but toadyism 
is more despicable when it bows to foreign vice. Why, 
you might as well steal the pillow-case of a small-pox 
hospital, or the shovels of a scavenger's cart, or the 
coffin of a leper, as|to make theft of these foreign plagues. 
If you want to destroy the people, have some originality 
of destruction ; have an American trap to catch the 
bodies and souls of men, instead of infringing on the 
patented inventions of European iniquity. 

Seated there that night, I also felt that if the good 
people of our cities knew what was going on in these 
haunts of iniquity, the^v would endure it no longer. 



62 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



The foundations of city life are rotten with iniquity, 
and if the foundations give way the whole structure 
must crumble. If iniquity progresses in the next one 
hundred years in the same ratio that it has pro- 
gressed in the century now closed, there will not be 
a vestige of moral or religious influence left. It is only 
a question of subtraction and addition. If the people 
knew how the virus is spreading they would stop it. I 
think the time has come for action. I wish that the next 
Mayor of ISTew York whether he be Augustus Schell or 
Edward Cooper, may rise up to the height of this posi- 
tion. Revolution is what we want, and that revolution 
would begin to-morrow if the moral and Christian peo- 
ple of our cities knew of the fires that slumber beneath 
them. - Once in a while a glorious city missionary or 
reformer like Mr. Brace or Mr. Yan Meter tells to a 
well-dressed audience in church the troubles that lie 
under our roaring metropolis, and the conventional 
church-goer gives his five dollars for bread, or gives his 
fifty dollars to help support a ragged school, and then 
goes home feeling that the work is done. Oh! my 
friends, the work will not be accomplished until by the 
force of public opinion the officers of the law shall be 
compelled to execute the law. We are told that the 
twenty-five hundred police of I^ew York cannot put 
down the five or six hundred dens of infamy, to say 
nothing of the gambling-houses and the unlicensed grog- 
shops. I reply, swear me in as a special police and give 
me two hundred police for two nights, and I would 
break up all the leading haunts of iniquity in these two 
cities, and arrest all their leaders and send such conster- 
nation in the smaller places that they would shut up of 
themselves! I do not think I should be afraid of law- 
suits for damages for false imprisonment. What we 



WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED 63 

want in these cities is a Stonewall Jackson's raid tlirongli 
all the places of iniquity I was persuaded by what I 
r-aw on that night of my exploration that the keepers of 
ail these haunts of iniquity are as afraid as they are of 
death of the police star, and the police club, and the 
police revolver. Hence, X declare that the existence of 
these aboniinations are to be charged either to police 
cowardice or to police complicity. 

A.i the close of our journey that night, we got in the 
carriage, and we came out on Broadway, and as we came 
down the street everything seemed silent save the clatter 
ing hoofs^and the wheels of our own conveyance Lock- 
ing dewr the long line of gaslights, the pavem.ent seemed 
very solitary The great sea of metropolitan life had 
ebbed, leaving a dry beach! JSTew York asleep! l^o! no! 
Burglary wide awake. Libertinism wide awake. Mur 
der wide awake. Ten thousand city iniquities wide 
awake. The click of the decanters in the worst hours of 
the debauch. The harvest of death full. Eternal woe 
the reaper. 

What is that? Trinity clock striking, one — two. 
"Good night," said the officers of the law, and I re 
sponded " good night," for they had been very kind, and 
very generous and very helpful to us. "Good night." 
And yet^ was there ever an adjective more misapplied ? 
Good night! Why, there was no expletive enough 
scarred and blasted to describe that night. Black night 
Forsaken night. Night of man's wickedness and woman's 
overthrow Night of awful neglect on the part of those 
who might help but do not. For many of those whom 
we had been watching, everlasting night. No hope. 
No rescue. No God. Black night of darkness forever. 
As far off as hell is from heaven was that night distant 
from being a good night- Oh, my friends, what are you 



64 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



going to do in this matter ? Punish the people ? That 
is not my theory. Prevent the people, warn the people, 
hinder the people before they go down. The first phi- 
lanthropist this country ever knew was Edward Living- 
ston, and he wrote these remarkable words in 1833: 

" As prevention in the diseases of the body is less painful, less ex- 
pensive, and more efficacious than the most skillful cure, so in the 
moral maladies of society, to arrest the vicious before the profligacy 
assumes the shape of crime, to take away from the poor the cause or 
pretense of relieving themselves by fraud or theft, to reform them by 
education, and make their own industry contribute to their support, 
although difficult and expensive, will be found more effectual inthe 
suppression of offenses, and more economical, than the best organized 
system of punishment." 

Next Sabbath morning I shall tell you of my second 
night of exploration. I have only opened the door of 
this great subject with which I hope to stir the cities. 
I have begun, and, God helping me, I will go through. 
Whoever else may be crowded or kept standing, or kept 
outside the doors, I charge the trustees and the ushers 
of this church that they give full elbow-room to all these 
journalists, since each one is another church five times, 
or ten times, or twenty times larger than this august 
assemblage, and it is by the printing-press that the Gos- 
pel of the Son of God is to be yet preached to all the 
world. May the blessing of the Lord God come down 
upon all the editors, and all the reporters, and all the 
compositors, and all the proof-readers, and all the type- 
setters ! 

But, my friends, before the iniquities of our cities 
are closed, my tongue may be silent in death, and 
many who are here this morning may have gone so far 
in sin they cannot get back. You have sometimes been 
walking on the banks of a river, and you have seen a 
man struggling in the water, and jow have thrown off 



WHOM I SAW, AND WHOM I MISSED. 



65 



your coat and leaped in for tlie rescue. So this morning 
I throw off the robe of pulpit conventionality, and I 
plunge in for your drowning soul. I have no cross 
words for you. T have only cross words for those who 
would destroy you. I am glad God has not put in my 
hand any one of the thunderbolts of His power, lest I 
might be tempted to hurl it at those who are plotting 
your ruin. I do not give you the tip end of the long 
fingers of the left hand, but I take your hand, hot with 
the fever of indulgences and trembling with last night's 
debauch, into both my hands, and give the heartiest 
grip of invitation and welcome. " Oh," you say, " you 
would not shake hands with me if you met me." I 
would. Try me at the foot of this platform and see if I 
will not. I have sometimes said that I would like to die 
with my hand in the hand of my family and my kin- 
dred; but I revoke that wish this morning and say I 
would like to die with my hand in the liand of a return- 
ing sinner, when, with God's help, I am trying to pull 
him up into the glorious liberty of the Gospel. I would 
like that to be my last work on earth. Oh! my bi'other, 
come back! Do you know that God made Richard Bax- 
ters and John Bunyans and E-obert I^ewtpns out of such 
as you are? Come back! and wash in the deep fountain 
of a Savior's mercy. I do not give you a cup, or a chal- 
ice, or a pitcher mfh a limited supply to effect your ab- 
lutions. I point you to the five oceans of God's mercy. 
Oh! that the Atlantic and Pacific surges of divine for- 
giveness might roll over your soul. I do not say to you, 
as we said to the ofiicers of the law when we left them 
on Broadway, "Good night." Oh, no. But, as the 
glorious sun of God's forgiveness rides on toward the 
mid heavens, ready to submerge you in warmtli and 
light and love, I bid you good morning! Morning of 



66 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



peace for all your troubles. Morning of liberation for 
all your incarcerations. Morning of resurrection for 
your soul buried in sin. Good morning! Morning for 
the resuscitated household that has been waiting for 
your return. Morning for the cradle and the crib 
already disgraced with being that of a drunkard's child. 
Morning for the daughter that has trudged off to hard 
work because you did not take care of home. Morning 
for the wife who at forty or fifty years has the wrinkled 
face, and the stooped shoulder, and the white hair. Morn- 
ing for one. Morning for all. Good morning ! In 
God's name, good morning. 

In our last dreadful war the Federals and the Con- 
federates were encamped on opposite sides of the Rappa- 
hannock, and one morning the brass band of the I^orth- 
ern troops played the national air, and all the Northern 
troops cheered and cheered. Then on the opposite side 
of the Rappahannock the brass band of the Confederates 
played My Maryland" and Dixie," and then all the 
Southern troops cheered and cheered. But after awhile 
one of the bands struck up " Home, Sweet Home," and 
the band on the opposite side of the river took up the 
strain, and when the tune was done the Confederates 
and the Federals all together united, as the tears rolled 
down their cheeks, in one great huzza! huzza! Well, 
my friends, heaven comes very near to-day. It is only 
a stream that divides us — the narrow stream of death — 
and the voices there and the voices here seem to com- 
mingle, and we join trumpets, and hosannahs, and halle- 
lujahs, and the chorus of the united song of earth and 
heaven is, " Home, Sweet Home." Home of bright 
domestic circle on earth. Home of forgiveness in the 
great heart of God. Home of eternal rest in heaven. 
Home ! Home ! Flome ! 



TKAP8 FOE VLtS, 



6t 



CHAPTER T. 

TRAPS FOR MEN. 

'* Surely in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird." — 
Proverbs vi : 9. 

Early ia the morning I went out with a fowler to 
catch wild pigeons. We hastened through the mountain 
gorge and into the forest. We spread out the net, and 
covered up the edges of it as well as we could. We 
arranged the call-bird, its feet fast, and its wings flap- 
ping in invitation to all fowls of heaven to settle down 
there. We retired into a booth of branches and leaves 
and waited. After a while, looking out of the door of 
the booth, we saw a flock of birds in the sky. They 
came nearer and nearer, and after a while were about to 
swoop into the net, when suddenly they darted away. 
Again we waited. After awhile we saw another flock of 
birds. They came nearer and nearer until just at the 
moment when they were about to swoop they darted 
away. The fowler was very much disappointed as well 
as myself. We said to each other, " What is the matter?" 
and " Why were not these birds caught?" We went out 
and examined the net, and by a flutter of a branch of a 
tree part of the net had been conspicuously exposed, 
and the birds coming very near had seen their peril and 
darted away. When I saw that, I said to the old fowler, 
*'That reminds me of a passage of Scripture: ' Surely iu 
vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.' " Now 
the net in my text stands for temptation. 



68 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



The call-bird of sin tempts men on from point to point 
and from branch to branch until they are about to drop 
into the net. If a man linds out in time that it is the 
temptation of the devil, or that evil men are attempting 
to capture his soul for time and for eternity, the man 
steps back. He says, " I am not to be caught in that 
way: I see what you are about: surely in vain is the 
net spread in the sight of any bird." 

There are two classes of temptations — the superficial 
and the subterraneous — those above ground, those under 
ground. If a man could see sin as it is, he would no 
more embrace it than he would embrace a leper. Sin is 
a daughter of hell, yet she is garlanded and robed and 
trinketed. Her voice is a warble. Her cheek is the 
setting sun. Her forehead is an aurora. She says to 
men: " Come, walk this path with me; it is thymed and 
primrosed, and the air is bewitched with the odors of 
the hanging gardens of heaven ; the rivers are rivers of 
wine, and all you have to do is to drink them up in 
chalices that sparkle with diamond and amethyst and 
crysoprasus. See ! It is all bloom and roseate cloud 
and heaven." Oh! my friends, if for one moment the 
choiring of all these concerted voices of sin could be 
hushed, we should see the orchestra of the pit with hot 
breath blowing through fiery flute, and the skeleton arms 
on drums of thunder and darkness beating the chorus: 
The end thereof is death." 

I want this morning to point out the insidious temp- 
tations that are assailing more especially our young men. 
The only kind of nature comparatively free from tempta- 
tion, so far as I can judge, is the cold, hard, stingy, mean 
temperament. What would Satan do with such a man 
if he got him? Satan is not anxious to get a man who, 
after a while, may dispute with him the realm of ever- 



TEAPS FOR MEN. 



69 



lasting^ meanness. It is the generous young man, the 
ardent young man, the wa-rm-hearted young man, the 
social young man, that is in especial peril. A pirate goes 
out on the sea, and one bright morning he puts the glass 
to his eye and looks off, and sees an empty vessel floating 
from port to port. He says: "JSTever mind; that's no 
prize for us." But the same morning he puts the glass 
to his eye, and he sees a vessel coming from'Australia laden 
with gold, or a vessel from the Indies laden with spices. 
He says: " That's our prize; bear down on it!" Across 
that unfortunate ship the grappling-hooks are thrown. 
The crew are blindfolded and are compelled to walk the 
plank. It is not the empty vessel, but the laden merchant- 
man that is the temptation to the pirate. And a young 
man empty of head, empty of heart, empty of life — you 
want no Young Men's Christian Association to keep him 
safe; he is safe. He will not gamble unless it is with some- 
body else's stakes. He will not break the Sabbath unless 
somebody else pays the horse hire. He will not drink 
unless some one else treats him. He will hang around 
the bar hour after hour, waiting for some generous young 
man to come in. The generous young man comes in 
and accosts him and says: " Well, will you have a drink 
with me to-day?'' The man, as though it were a sudden 
thing for him, says: "Well, well, if you insist on it I 
will— I will." 

Too mean to go to perdition unless somebody else 
pays his expenses! For such young men we will not 
tight. We would no more contend for them than Tartary 
and Ethiopia would fight as to who should have the great 
Sahara Desert; but for those young men who are 
buoyant and enthusiastic, those who are determined to 
do something for time and for eternity — for them we 
will fight, and we now declare everlasting war against ^ 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



all the influences that assail them, and we ask all good 
men and philanthropists to wheel into line, and all the 
armies of Heaven to bear down upon the foe, and we pray 
Almighty God that with the thunderbolts of his wrath 
he will strike down and consume all these influences that 
are attempting to destroy the young men for whom 
Christ died. 

The first class of temptations that assaults a young man 
is led on by the skeptic. He will not admit he is an 
infidel or atheist. Oh, no! he is a "freethinker;" he is 
one of your "liberal" men; he is free and easy in 
religion. O! how liberal he is; he so "liberal " that he 
will give away his Bible; he is so " liberal " that he will 
give aM ay the throne of eternal justice; he is so "liberal" 
that he would be willing to give God out of the universe; 
he is so "liberal " that he would give up his own soul 
and the souls of all his friends. Now, what more could 
you ask in the way of liberality? The victim of this 
skeptic has probably just come from the country. 
Through the intervention of friends he has been placed 
in a shop. On Saturday the skeptic says to him, "Well, 
what are you going to do to-morrow?" He says, " I am 
going to church." "Is it possible?" says the skeptic^ 
" Well, I used to do those things; I was brought up, 1 
suppose, as you were, in a religious family, and I be- 
lieved all those things, but I got over it; the fact is, since 
I came to town I have read a great deal, and I have 
found that there are a great many things in the Bible 
that are ridiculous. ^sTow, for instance, all that about 
the serpent being cursed to crawl in the garden of Eden 
because it had tempted our first parents; why you see 
how absurd it is ; you can tell from the very organiza- 
tion of the serpent that it had to crawl; it crawled before 
it was cursed just as well as it crawled afterwards; you 



TJBAPS FOE MEN. 



71 



can tell from its organization that it crawled. Then all 
that story about the whale swallowing Jonah, or Jonah 
swallowing the whale, which was it? It don't make any 
difference, the thing is absurd; it is ridiculous to sup- 
pose that a man could have gone down through the jaws 
of a sea monster and yet kept his life; why, his respira- 
tion would have been hindered; he would liave been 
digested; the gastric juice would have dissolved the 
fibrine and coagulated albumen, and Jonah would have 
been changed from prophet into chyle. Then all that 
story about the miraculous conception— why, it is per- 
fectly disgraceful. O! sir, I believe in the light of 
nature. This is the nineteenth century. Progress, sir, 
progress. I don't blame you, but after you have been in 
town as long as I have, you will think just as I do."" 

Thousands of young men are going down under that 
process day by day, and there is only here and there a 
young man who can endure this artillery of scorn. They 
are giving up their Bibles. The light of nature! They 
have the light of nature in China; they have it in Hin- 
dostan; they have it in Ceylon. Flowers there, stars 
there, waters there, winds there; but no civilization, no 
homes, no happiness. Lancets to cut, and Juggernauts 
to fall under, and hooks to swing on; but no happiness. 
I tell you, my young brother, we have to take a religion 
of some kind. We have to choose between four or five. 
Shall it be the Koran of the Mohammedan, or the 
Shaster of the Hindoo, or the Zendavesta of the Persian, 
or the Confucius writings of the Chinese, or the Holy 
Scriptures? Take what you will; God helping me, I will 
take the Bible. Light for all darkness; rock for all 
foundation; balm for all wounds. A glory that lifts its 
pillars of fire over the wilderness march. Do not give 
up your Bibles. If these people scoff at you as though 



72 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE,. 



religion and the Bible were fit onlj for weak-minded 
people, you just tell tbem you are not ashamed to be in 
the company of Burke the statesman, and Raphael the 
painter, and Thorwaldsen the sculptor, and Mozart the 
musician, and Blackstone the lawyer, and Bacon the 
philosopher, and Harvey the physician, and John 
Milton the poet. Ask them what infidelity has ever 
done to lift the fourteen hundred millions of the race 
out of barbarism. Ask them when infidelity ever insti- 
tuted a sanitary commission; and, before you leave their 
society once and for ever, tell them that they have in- 
sulted the memory of your Christian father, and spit 
upon the death-bed of your mother, and with swine's 
snout rooted up the grave of your sister who died believ- 
ing in the Lord Jesus. 

Young man, hold on to your Bible? It is the best 
book you ever owned. It will tell you how to dress, how 
to bargain, how to walk, how to act, how to live, how to 
die. Glorious Bible! whether on parchment or paper, 
in octavo or duodecimo, on the center table of the draw- 
ing-room or in the counting-room of the banker. Glo- 
rious Bible! Light to our feet and lamp to our path. 
Hold on to it! 

The second class of insidious temptations that comes 
upon our young men is led on by the dishonest employer. 
Every commercial establishment is a school. In nine 
cases out of ten, the principles of the employer become 
the principles of the employe. I ask the older mer- 
chants to bear me out in these statements. If, when you 
were just starting in life, in commercial life, you were 
told that honesty was not marketable, that though you 
might sell all the goods in the shop, you must not sell 
your conscience, that while you were to exercise all 
industry and tact, you were not to sell your conscience — 



TEAPS FOE MEN. 



if you were taught that gains gotten by sin were com- 
bustible, and at|the moment of ignition would be blown, 
on by the breath of God until all the splendid estate 
would vanish into white ashes scattered in the whirl- 
wind — then that instruction has been to you a precaution 
and a help ever since. There are hundreds of commer- 
cial establishments in our great cities which are edu- 
cating a class of young men who will be the honor of 
the land, and there are other estabhshments which are 
educating young men to be nothing but sharpers. What 
chance is there for a young man who was taught in an 
establishment that it is right to lie, if it is smart, and 
that a French label is all that is necessary to make a thing 
French, and that you ought always to be honest when it 
pays, and that it is wrong to steal unless you do it well? 
Sup"^>ose, now, a young man just starting in life enters a 
place jf that kind where there are ten young men, all 
drilled in the infamous practices of the establishment. 
He is ready to be taught. The young man has no theory 
of commercial ethics. Where is he to get his theory? 
He will get the theory from his employers. .One day he 
pushes his wit a little beyond what the establishment 
demands of him, and he fleeces a customer until the 
clerk is on the verge of being seized by the law. What 
is done in the establishment? He is not arraigned. 
The head man of the establishment says to him : "Now, 
be careful; be careful, young man, you might be caught; 
but really that was splendidly done; you will get along 
in the world, I warrant you." Then that young man 
goes up until he becomes head clerk. He has found 
there is a premium on iniquity. 

One morning the employer comes to the establishment. 
He goes into his counting-room and throws up his hands 
and shouts: "Why, the safe has been robbed!" What 



JJIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



is the matter? Nothing, nothing; only the clerk who 
had been practicing a good while on customers is prac- 
ticing a little on the employer, No new principle intro- 
duced into that establishment. It is a poor rule that 
will not work botli ways. You must never steal unless 
you can do it well. He did it well. I am not talking 
an abstraction; I am talking a terrible and a crushing 
fact. 

Now here is a young man. Look at him to- day. 
Look at him five years f?om now, after he has been 
under trial in such an establishment Here he stands 
in the shop to-day, his cheeks i-uddy with the breath of 
the hills. He unrolls the goods on the counter in gen- 
tlemanly style. He commends them to the purchaser. 
He points out all the good points in the fabric. He 
effects the sale. The goods are wrapped up, and he dis- 
misses the customer with a cheerful "good morning," 
and the country merchant departs so impressed with the 
straightforwardness of that young man that he will come 
ag-ain and again^ every spring and every autumn unless 
interfered wjth The young man has been now in that 
establishment five years. He unrolls the goods on the 
counter. He says to the customer, "Now those are the 
best goods we have in our establishment ," they have bet- 
ter on the next shelf. He says: "We are selling these 
goods less than coRt;" they are making twenty percent. 
He says. ' There is nothing like them in all the city;" 
there are fifty shops that want to sell the same thing. 
He says: 'Now, that is a durable article, it will wash;" 
yes it will wash out. The sale is made, the goods are 
wrapped up, the country merchant goes off feeling that 
he has an equivalent for his money, and the sharp clerk 
goes into the private room of the counting-house, and 
he says* "Well, I got rid of those goods at last; I leally 



TEAPS FOB MEN. 



76 



thought we never would sell them; I told him we were 
selling them less than cost, and he thought he was 
getting a good bargain; got rid of them at last." And 
the head of the firm saj^s : ^'That's well done, splendidly 
done; let's go over to Delmonico's.'* Meanwhile, God 
had recorded eight lies — four lies against the young man, 
four lies against his employer, for I undertake to say that 
the employer is responsible for all the iniquities of his 
clerks, and all the iniquities of those who are clerks of 
these clerks, down to the tenth generation, if those em- 
ployers inculcated iniquitous and damning principles. I 
stand before young men this morning who are under this 
pressure, i say, come out of it. "Oh I" you say, ''I 
can't; I have my widowed mother to support, and if a 
man loses a situation now he can't get another one." 1 
say, come out of it. Go home to your mother and say 
to her, "Mother, I can't sta}^ in that shop and be upright; 
what shall I do?" and if she is worthy of you she will 
say, "Come out of it, my son — we will just throw our- 
selves on him who hath promised to be the God of the 
widow and the fatherless; he will take care of us." And 
I tell you no young man ever permanently suffered by 
such a course of conduct. In Philadelphia, in a drug 
shop, a young man said to his employer: "I want to 
please you, really, and I am willing to sell medicines on 
Sunday; but I can't sell this patent shoe- blacking on 
Sunday." "Well," said the head man, "you will have 
to do it, or else you will have to go away." The young 
man said: "I can't do it; I am willing to sell medicines, 
but not shoe-blacking." "Well, then, go! Go now." 
The young man went away. The Lord looked after him. 
The hundreds of thousands of dollars he won in this 
world were the smallest part of his fortune. God hon- 
ored him. By tlie course he took he saved his soul as 



mGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



well as his fortunes in the future. A man said to his 
employer: ''I can't wash the wagon on Sunday morning; 
I am willing to wash it on Saturday afternoon; but, sir, 
you will please excuse me, I can't wash the wagon on 
Sunday morning." His employer said: "You must 
wash it; my carriage comes in every Saturday night, and 
you have got to wash it on Sunday morning." "I can't 
do it," the man said. They parted. The Lord looked 
after him, grandly looked after him. He is worth to-day 
a hundred-fold more than his employer ever was or ever 
will be, and he saved his soul. Young man, it is safe to 
do right. There are young men in this house to-day 
who, under this storm of temptation, are striking deeper 
and deeper their roots, and spreading out broader their 
branches. They are Daniels in Babylon, they are J osephs 
in the Egyptian court, they are Pauls amid the wild 
beasts at Ephesus. I preach to encourage them. Lay 
hold of God and be faithful. 

There is a mistake we make about young men. We 
put them in two classes: the one class is moral, the other 
is dissolute. The moral are safe The dissolute cannot 
be reclaimed. I deny both propositions. The moral are 
not safe unless they have laid hold of God, and the dis- 
solute may be reclaimed. I suppose there are self- 
righteous men in this house who feel no need of God, 
and will not seek after him, and they will go out in the 
world and they will be tempted, and they will be flung 
down by misfortune, and they will go down, down, down, 
until some night you will see them going home hooting, 
raving, shouting blasphemy — sjoing home to their mother, 
going home to their sister, going home to the young 
companion to whom, only a little while ago, in the pres- 
ence of a brilliant assemblage, flashing lights and orange 
blossoms, and censers swinging in the air, they promised 



TKAPS FOK MEN. 



77 



fidelity and purity, and kindness perpetual. As that 
man reaches the door, she will open it, not with an out- 
cry, but she will stagger back from the door as he comes, 
in, and in her look there will be the prophecy of woes 
that are coming: want that will shiver in need of a fire, 
hunger that will cry in vain for bread, cruelties that will 
not leave the heart when they have crushed it, but pinch 
it again, and stab it again, until some night she will open 
the door of the place where her companion was ruined, 
and she will fling out her arm from under her ragged 
shawl and say, with almost omnipotent eloquence, "Give 
me back my husband! Give me back my protector! 
Give me back my all! Him of the kind heart and gentle 
words, and the manly brow — give him back to me!" 
And then the wretches, obese and filthy, will push back 
their matted locks, and they will say, "Put her out! 
Put her out!" Oh! self-righteous man, without God 
you are in peril. Seek after him to-day. Amid the ten 
thousand temptations of life there is no safety for a man 
without God. 

But I may be addressing some who have gone astray, 
and so I assault that other proposition that the dissolute 
cannot be reclaimed. Perhaps you have only gone a 
little astray. While I speak are you troubled? Is there 
a voice within you saying, " What did you do that for? 
Why did you go there ? What did you mean by that ?" 
Is there a memory in your soul that makes you tremble 
this morning ? God only knows all our hearts. Yea, 
if you have gone so far as to commit iniquities, and have 
gone through the whole catalogue, I invite you back 
this morning. The Lord waits for you. "Rejoice! 
O young man, in thy youth, and let thy heart cheer 
thee in the days of thy youth ; but know thou that for 
all these things God will bring thee into judgment." 



78 



NIGHT SIDES OF OITY LIFi.. 



Come home, voung man, to your father's God. Oome 
home, young man, to your mother's God. O! I wish 
that all the batteries of the Gospel could to-day be un- 
limbered against all those influences which are taking 
down so many of our young men. I would like to blow 
a trumpet of warning, and recruit until this whole 
audience would march out on a crusade against the evils 
of society. But let none of us be disheartened. O! 
Christian workers, my heart is high with hope. The 
dark horizon is blooming into the morning of which 
prophets spoke, and of which poets have dreamed, and 
of which painters have sketched. The world's bridal 
hour advances. The mountains will kiss the morning 
radiant and effulgent, and all the waves of the sea will 
become the crystal keys of a great organ, on which the 
fingers of everlasting joy shall play the grand march of 
a world redeemed. Instead of the thorn there shall come 
up the fir tree, and instead of the briar there shall come 
up the myrtle tree, and the mountains and the hills shall 
break forth into singing, and all the trees of the wood 
shall clap their hands! 



STRANGERS WABNm). 



79 



CHAPTER YI. 

STRANGERS WARNED. 

"And Solomon numbered all the strangers that were in the land of 
Israel." — 2 Chron, it : 17. 

If, in the time when people traveled afoot or on camel- 
back, and vacillation from city to city was seldom, it was 
important that Solomon recognize the presence of stran- 
gers, how much more important, now in these days, when 
by railroad and steamboat the population of the earth 
are always in motion, and from one year's end to the 
other, our cities are crowded with visitors. Every morn- 
ing, on the Hudson E-iver railroad track, there come in, 
I think, about six trains, and on the Kew Jersey railroad 
track some thirteen passenger trains ; so that all the 
depots and the wharves are a-rumble and a-clang with 
the coming in of a great immigration of strangers. 
Some of them come for purposes of barter, some for 
mechanism, some for artistic gratification, some for sight- 
seeing. A great many of them go out on the evening 
trains, and consequently the city makes but little im- 
pression upon them; but there are multitudes who, in 
the hotels and boarding-houses, make temporary resi- 
dence. They tarry here for three or four days, or as 
many weeks. They spend the days in the stores and the 
evenings in sight-seeing. Their temporary stay will 
make or break them, not only financially but morally, 
for this world and the world that is to come. Multitudes 
of them come into our morning and evening services. 
I am conscious that I stand in the presence of many 



80 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



of them now. I desire more especially to speak to 
them. May God give me the right word and help me to 
utter it in the right way. 

There have glided into this house those unknown to 
others, whose history, if told, would be more thrilling 
than the deepest tragedy, more exciting than Eilsson's 
song, more bright than a spring morning, more awful 
than a wintry midnight. If they could stand up here 
and tell the story of their escapes, and their temptations, 
and their bereavements, and their disasters, and their 
victories, and their defeats, there would be in this house 
such a commingling of groans and acclamations as would 
make the place unendurable. 

There is^a man who, in infancy, lay in a cradle satin- 
lined. There is a man who was picked up, a foundling, 
on Boston Common. Here is a man who is coolly ob- 
serving this day's service, expecting no advantage, and 
caring for no advantage for himself ; while yonder 
is a man who has been for ten years in an awful confla- 
gration of evil habits, and he is a mere cinder of a 
destroyed nature, and he is wondering if there shall be 
in this service any escape or help for his immortal soul. 
Meeting you only once, perhaps, face ^to face, I strike 
hands with you in an earnest talk about your present 
condition, and your eternal well-being. St. Paul's ship 
at Melita went to pieces where two seas meet ; but we 
stand to-day at a point where a thousand seas converge, 
and eternity alone can tell the issue of the hour. 

The hotels of this country, for beauty and elegance, 
are not surpassed by the hotels in any other land ; but 
those that are most celebrated for brilliancy of tapestry 
and mirror cannot give to the guest any costly apart- 
ment, unless he can afford a parlor in addition to his 
lodging. The stranger, therefore, will generally find as- 



STRANGERS WARNED. 



81 



signed to him a room without any pictures, and perhaps 
any rocking chair! He will find a box of matches on a 
bureau .and an old newspaper left by the previous occu- 
pant, and that will be about all the ornamentation. At 
seven o'clock in the evening, after having taken his re- 
past, he will look over his memorandum-book of the 
day's work ; he will write a letter to his home, and then 
a desperation will seize upon him to get out. You hear 
the great city thundering under your windows, and you 
say: " I must join that procession," and in ten minutes 
you have joined it. Where are you going? " Oh," you 
say, "I haven't made up my mind yet." Better make 
up your mind before your start. Perhaps the very way 
you go now you will always go. Twenty years ago there 
were young men who came down the Astor House steps, 
and started out in a wrong direction, where they have 
been going ever since. 

" Well, where are you going ?" says one man. " I 
am going to the Academy to hear some music." Good. 
I would like to join you at the door. At the tap of the 
orchestral baton, all the gates of harmony and beauty 
will open before your soul. I congratulate you. Where 
are you going % " Well," you say, " I am going up to 
see some advertised pictures." Good. 1 should like to 
go along with you and look over the same catalogue, and 
study with you Kensett, and Bierstadt, and Church, and 
Moran. Nothing more elevating than good pictures. 
Where are you going ? " Well," you say, I am going 
up to the Young Men's Christian Association rooms." 
Good. You will find there gymnastics to strengthen 
the muscles, and books to improve the mind, and Chris- 
tian influence to save the soul. I wish every city in the 
United States had as fine a palace for its Young Men's 
Christian Association as JSIew York has. Where are 
6 



82 



NIGHT SIDES OF OITY LIFE 



you going % " Well," you say, " I am going to take a 
long walk up Broadway, and so turn around into the 
Bowery. I am going to study human life." Grood. A 
walk through Broadway at eight o'clock at night is inter- 
esting, educating, fascinating, appalling, exhilarating to 
the last degree. Stop in front of that theater, and see 
who goes in. Stop at that saloon, and see who comes 
out. See the great tides of life surging backward and 
forward, and beating against the marble of the curbstone, 
and eddying down into the saloons. What is that mark 
on the face of that debauchee? It is the hectic flusli of 
eternal death. What is that Woman's laughter ? It is 
the shriek of a lost soul. Who is that Christian man 
going along with a phial of anodyne to the dying pauper 
on Elm street? Who is that ])L'lated man on the way to 
a prayer-meeting ? Who is that city missionary going 
to take a box in which to bury a child? Who are all 
these clusters of bright and beautiful faces? They are 
going to some interesting place of amusement. Who is 
that man going into the drug-store? That is the man 
who yesterday lost all his fortune on Wall street. He 
is going in for a dose of belladonna, and before morning 
it will make no difference to him whether stocks are up 
or down. I tell you that Broadway, between seven and 
twelve o'clock at night, between the Battery and Union- 
square, is an Austerlitz, a Gettysburg, a Waterloo, where 
kingdoms are lost or won, and three worlds mingle in the 
strife. 

I meet another coming down off the hotel steps, and I 
say: "Where are you going?" You say: ''I am 
going with a merchant of New York who has promised 
to-night to show me the underground life of the city. I 
am his customer, and he is going to oblige me very 
much." Stop! A business house that tries to get or 



STKANGEKS WARNED. 



83 



keep your custom through such a process as that, is not 
worthy of you. There are business establishments in 
our cities which have for years been sending to eternal 
destruction hundreds and thousands of merchants. They 
have a secret drawer in the counter, where money is kept, 
and the clerk goes and gets it when he wants to take 
these visitors to the city through the low slums of the 
place. Shall I mention the names of some of these great 
commercial establishments? I have them on my lip- 
Shall I ? Perhaps I had better leave it to the young 
men who, in that process, have been destroyed themselves 
while they have been destroying others. I care not how 
high-sounding the name of a commercial establishment 
if it proposes to get customers or to keep them by such 
a process as that; drop their acquaintance. They will 
cheat you before you get through. They will send to 
you a style of goods different from that which you bought 
by sample. They will give you under-weight. There 
will be in the package half-a-dozen less pairs of sus- 
penders than you paid for. They will rob you. Oh, you 
feel in yonr pockets and say: "Is my money gone ?" 
They have robbed you of something for which pounds 
and shillings can never give you compensation. When 
one of these Western merchants has been dragged by one 
of these commercial agents through the slums of the 
city, he is not fit to go home. The mere memory of 
what he has seen will be moral pollution, unless lie go 
on positive Christian errand. I think you had better 
let the city missionary and the police and the Christian 
"reformer attend to the exploration of New York and 
underground life. You do not go to a small-pox hospital 
for the purpose of exploration. You do not go there, 
because you are afraid of the contagion. And yet, you 
go into the presence of a moral leprosy that is as much 



84 



JJIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



more dangerous to you as the death of the soul is worse 
than the death of the body. I will undertake to say that 
nine-tenths of the men who have been ruined in our cities 
have been ruined by simply going to observe without 
any idea of participating. The fact is that underground 
city life is a filthy, fuming, reeking, pestiferous depth 
which may blast the eye that looks at it. In the Keign 
of Terror, in 1792, in Paris, people, escaping from the 
ofiicers of the law, got into the sewers of the city, and 
crawled and walked through miles of that awful labyrinth, 
stifled with the atmosphere and almost dead, some of 
them, when they came out to the river Seine, where they 
washed themselves and again breathed the fresh air. 
But I have to tell you that a great many of the men who 
go on the work of exploration through the underground 
gutters of New York life never come out at any Seine 
river where they can wash off the pollution of the moral 
sewerage. Stranger, if one of the " drummers " of the 
city, as they are called — if one of the "drummers" pro- 
pose to take you and show you the " sights " of the town 
and underground New York, say to him: "Please, sir, 
what part do you propose to show me?" 

Sabbath morning comes. You wake up in the hotel. 
You have had a longer sleep than usual. You say: 
"Where am I ? a thousand miles from home ! I have no 
family to take to church to-day. My pastor will not expect 
my presence. I think I shall look over my accounts and 
study my memorandum-book. Then I will write a few 
business letters, and talk to that merchant who came in 
on the same train with me." Stop! you cannot afford to 
do it. 

"But," you say, "I am worth five hundred thousand 
dollars." You cannot afford to do it. You say: "I am 
worth a million dollars. " You cannot afford to do it. All 



/ 



STRANG-ERS WARNED. 85 

JO 11 gain by breaking the Sabbath you will lose. You 
will lose one of three things : your intellect, your morals, 
or your property, and you cannot point in the whole earth 
to a single exception to this rule, God gives ns six days 
and keeps one for himself. 'Now if we try to get the 
seventh, he will upset the work of all the other six. 

I remember going up Mount Washington, before the 
railroad had been built, to the Tip-Top House, and the 
guide would come around to our horses and stop ns when 
we were crossing a very steep and dangerous place, and 
he would tighten the girdle of the horse, and straighten 
the saddle. And I have to tell you that this road of life 
is so steep and full of peril we must, at least one day in 
seven, stop and have the harness of life readjusted, and 
our souls re-equipped. The seven days of the week are 
like seven business partners, and you must give to each 
one his share, or the business will be broken up. God is 
so generous with us ; he has given you six days to his 
one. l^ow, here is a father who has seven apples, and he 
gives six to his greedy boy, proposing to keep one for 
himself. The greedy boy grabs for the other one and loses 
all the six. 

How few men there are who know how to keep the 
Lord's day away from home. A great many who are con- 
sistent on the banks of the St. Lawrence, or the Alabama, 
or the Mississippi, are not consistent when they get so 
far off as the East River. I repeat — though it is putting 
it on a low ground — you cannot financially afford to break 
the Lord's day. It is only another way of tearing up 
your government securities, and putting down the price 
of goods, and blowing up your store. I have friends who 
are all the time slicing off pieces of the Sabbath. They cut 
a little of the Sabbath off that end, and a little of the Sab- 
bath off this end. They do not keep the twenty-four hours. 



86 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



The Bible says: ^'Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it 
holy." I have good friends who are quite accustomed to 
leaving Albany by the midnight train on Saturday night, 
and getting home before church. 'Now, there may be 
occasions when it is right, but generally it is wrong. 
How if the train should run off the track into the E'orth 
Kiver ? I hope your friends will not send for me to preach 
your funeral sermon. It would be an awkward thing for 
me to stand up by your side and preach — you a Christian 
man killed on a rail-train traveling on a Sunday morn- 
ing. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. " 
What does that mean? It means tweuty-four hours. 
A man owes you a dollar. You don't want him to pay 
you ninety cents; you want the dollar. If God demands 
of us twenty-four hours out of the week, he means twenty- 
four hours and not nineteen. Oh, we want to keep vig- 
ilantly in this country the American Sabbath, and not 
have transplanted here the German or the French Sab- 
bath. If any of you have been in Paris you know that 
on Sabbath morning tlie vast population rush out toward 
the country with baskets and bundles, and toward night, 
they come back fagged out, cross, and intoxicated. May 
God preserve to us our glorious, quiet American Sab- 
baths. 

And so men come to the verge of city life and say : 
" Now we'll look off. Gome, young man, don't be afraid. 
Come near, let's look off." He looks and looks, until, 
after a while, Satan comes and puts a hand on each of his 
shoulders and pushes him off. Society says it is evil 
proclivity on the part of that young man. Oh, no, he 
was simply an exploror, and sacrificed his life in dis- 
covery. A young man comes in from the country brag- 
ging that nothing can do him any harm. He knows 
about all the tricks of city life. "Why," he says, "didn't 



STRANGERS AVAKNEI). 



87 



I receive a circular in the country telling me that some- 
how they found out I was a sharp business man, and if I 
would only send a certain amount of money by mail or 
express, charges prepaid, they would send a package with 
which 1 could make a fortune in two months; but I didn't 
believe it. My neighbors did, but I didn't. Why, no 
man could take my money. I carry it in a pocket inside 
my vest. 'No man could take it. No man could cheat 
me at the faro table. Don't I know all about the 'cue- 
box,' and the 'dealer's-box,' and the cards stuck together 
as though they were one, and when to hand in my 
cheques? Oh, they can't cheat me. I know what I am 
about." While, at the same time, that very moment, 
such men are succumbing to the worst Satanic influences, 
in the simple fact that they are going to observe. ISTow, 
if a man or woman shall go down into a haunt of iniquity 
for the purpose of reforming men and women — if, as did 
John Howard, or Elizabeth Fry, or Yan Meter, they go 
down among the abandoned for the sake of saving souls — 
or as did Chalmers and G-uthrie to see sin, that they 
might better combat it, then they shall be Grod-protected, 
and they will come out better than when they went in. 
But if you go on this work of exploration merely for 
the purpose of satisfying a morbid curiosity, I will take 
twenty per cent, off your moral character. O strangers, 
welcome to the great city. May you find Christ here, 
and not any physical or moral damage. Men coming 
from inland, from distant cities, have here found God and 
found him in our service. May that be your case 
now. You thought you were brought to this place merely 
for the purpose of sight-seeing. Perhaps God brought 
you to this roaring city for the purpose of working out 
your eternal salvation. Gro back to your homes and tell 
them how you met Christ here — the loving, patient, par- 



88 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



doning, and sympathetic Christ. Who knows but the 
city which has been the destruction of so many may be 
your eternal redemption? 

A good many years ago, Edward Stanley, the English 
commander, with his regiment, took a fort. The fort was 
manned by some three hundred Spaniards. Edward 
Stanley came close up to the fort, leading his men, when 
a Spaniard thrust at him with a spear, intending to 
destroy his life ; but Stanley caught hold of the spear, 
and the Spaniard in attempting to jerk the spear away 
from Stanley, lifted him up into the battlements. No 
sooner had Stanley taken his position on the battlements, 
than he swung his sword and his whole regiment leaped 
up after him and the fort was taken. So may it be with 
you, O stranger. The city influences which have destroyed 
so many and dashed them down for ever, shall be the 
means of lifting you up into the tower of God's mercy 
and strength, your soul more than conqueror through the 
grace of Him who hath promised an especial benediction 
to those who shall treat you well, saying : "I was a 
stranger and ye took me in." 



PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 



89 



CHAPTEK YII. 

PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 

" Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that all they 
which pass by the way do pluck her? The boar out of the wood 
doth waste it, and the wild beast of the field doth devour it." — Psalms 
Ixxx: 12, 13. 

By this homely but expressive figure, the text sets 
forth the bad influences which in olden time broke in 
upon God's heritage, as with swine's foot trampling, and 
as with swine's snout uprooting the vineyards of pros- 
perity. What was true then is true now. There have 
been enough trees of righteousness planted to overshadow 
the whole earth, had it not been for the axe- men who 
hewed them down. The temple of truth would long 
ago have been completed, had it not been for the icono- 
clasts who defaced the walls and battered down the pil- 
lars. The whole earth would have been an Eshcol of 
ripened clusters, had it not been that " the boar has 
wasted it and the wild beast of the field devoured it." 

I propose to point out to you those whom I consider 
to be the uprooting and devouring classes of society. 
First, thejpublic criminals. Y'ou ought not to be surprised 
that these people make up a large portion in many com- 
munities. The vast majority of the criminals who take 
ship from Europe come into our own port. In 1869, of 
the forty-nine thousand people who were incarcerated in 
the prisons of the country, thirty-two thousand were of 
foreign birth. Many of them were the very desperadoes 
of society, oozing into the slums of our cities, waiting 



90 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFB. 



for an opportunity to riot and steal and debauch, joining 
the large gang of American thugs and cut- throats. There 
are in this cluster of cities — 'New York, Jersey City, 
and Brooklyn — four thousand people whose entire busi- 
ness in life is to commit crime. That is as much their 
business as jurisprudence or medicine or merchandise is 
your business. To it they bring all their energies of 
body, mind, and soul, and they look upon the interreg- 
nums which they spend in prison as so much unfortunate 
loss of time, just as you look upon an attack of influenza 
or rheumatism which fastens you in the house for a few 
days. It is their lifetime business to pick pockets, and 
blow up safes, and shoplift, and ply the panel game, and 
they have as much pride of skill in their business as you 
have in yours when you upset the argument of an 
opposing council, or cure a gunshot fracture which other 
surgeons have given up, or foresee a turn in the market 
so you buy goods just before they go up twenty per cent. 
It is their business to commit crime, and I do not sup- 
pose that once in a 7/ear the thought of the immorality 
strikes them. Added to these professional criminals, 
American and foreign, there is a large class of men who 
are more or less industrious in crime. In one year the 
police in this cluster of cities arrested ten thousand 
people for theft, and ten thousand for assault and battery, 
and fifty thousand for intoxication. Drunkenness is 
responsible for much of the theft, since it confuses a 
man's ideas of property, and he gets his hands on things 
that do not belong to him. Rum is responsible for 
much of the assault and battery, inspiring men to sudden 
bravery, which they must demonstrate though it be on 
the face of the next gentleman. 

Seven million dollars' worth of property stolen m 
this cluster of cities in one year. You cannot, as good 



\ 

PEOPLE TO BE FEAEED. 



91 



citizens, be independent of that fact. It will touch your 
pocket, since I have to give you the fact that these three 
cities pay seven million dollars' worth of taxes a year to 
arraign, try, and support the criminal population. You 
help to pay the board of every criminal, from the sneak- 
thief that snatches a spool of cotton, up to some man 
who enacts a " Black Friday." More than that, it 
touches your heart in the moral depression of the com- 
munity. You might as well think to stand in a closely 
confined room where there are fifty people and yet not 
breathe the vitiated air, as to stand in a community where 
there is such a great multitude of the depraved without 
somewhat being contaminated. What is the fire that 
burns your store down compared with the conflagration 
which consumes your morals? What is the theft of the 
gold and silver from your money safe compared with the 
theft of your children's virtue? 

We are all ready to arraign criminals. We shout at 
the top of our voice, " Stop thief!" and when the police 
get on the track we come out, hatless and in our slippers, 
and assist in the arrest. We come around the bawling 
ruffian and hustle him off to justice, and when he gets in 
prison, what do we do for him? With great gusto we 
put on the handcuffs and the hopples; but what prepara- 
tion are we making for the day when the handcuffs and 
the hopples come off ? Society seems to say to these 
criminals, " Yillain, go in there and rot," when it ought 
to say, "You are an offender against the law, but we 
mean to give you an opportunity to repent; we mean to 
help you. Here are Bibles and tracts and Christian in- 
fluences. Christ died for you. Look, and live." 

Yast improvements have been made by introducing 
industries into the prison; but we want something more 
than hammers and shoe lasts to reclaim these people. 



92 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



Aye, we want more than sermons on the Sabbath day, 
Society must impress these men with the fact that it 
does not enjoy their suffering, and that it is attempt- 
ing to reform and elevate them. The majority of 
criminals suppose that society has a grudge against 
them, and they in turn have a grudge against society. 

They are harder in heart and more infuriate when they 
come out of jail than when ,they went in. Many of the 
people who go to prison go again and again and again. 
Some years ago, of fifteen hundred prisoners who during 
the year had been in Sing Sing, four hundred had been 
there before. In a house of correction in the country, 
where during a certain reach of time there had been five 
thousand people, more than three thousand had been there 
before. So, in one case the prison, and in the other case 
the house of correction, left them just as bad as they were 
before. The secretary of one of the benevolent societies 
of New York saw a lad fifteen years of age who had 
spent three years of his life in prison, and he said to tlie 
lad, " What have they done for you to make you better?" 

Well," replied the lad, " the first time I was brought 
up before the judge he said, ' You ought to be ashamed 
of yourself.' And then I committed a crime again, and 
I was brought up before the same judge, and he said, 
'You rascal!' And after a while I committed some 
other crime, and I was ^brought before the same judge, 
and he said, ' You ought to be hanged.' " That is all they 
had done for him in the way of reformation and salva- 
tion. "Oh," you say, " these people are incorrigible." I 
suppose there are hundreds of persons this day lying in 
the prison bunks who would leap up at the prospect of 
reformation, if society would only allow them a way into 
decency and respectability. "Oh," you ^y, *' I have no 
patience with these rogues." I ask you in reply. How 



PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 



93 



much better would you have been under the same circum- 
stances? Suppose your mother had been a blasphemer 
and your father a sot, and you had started life with a 
body stuffed with evil proclivities, and you had spent 
much of your time in a cellar amid obscenities and curs- 
ing, and if at ten years of age you had been compelled 
to go out and steal, battered and banged at night if you 
came in without any spoils, and suppose your early man- 
hood and womanhood had been covered with rags and 
filth, and decent society had turned its back upon you^ 
and left you to consort with vagabonds and wharf-rats — 
how much better would you have been ? I have no sym- 
pathy with that executive clemency which would let 
crime run loose, or which would sit in the gallery of a 
court-room weeping because some hard-hearted wretch 
is brought to justice; but I do say that the safety and 
life of the community demand more potential influences 
in behalf of public offenders. 

"Within five minutes' walk of where I now stand, there 
is a prison, enougli to bring down the wrath of Almighty 
God on this city of Brooklyn. It is the Raymond Street 
Jail. It would not be strange if the jail fever should 
start in that horrible hole, like that which raged in Eng- 
land during the session of the Black Assize, when three 
hundred perished — judges, jurors, constables, and law- 
yers. Alas, that our fair city should have such a pest- 
house. I understand the sheriff and the jail -keeper do 
all they can, under the circumstances, for the comfort of 
these people; but five and six people are crowded into a 
place where there ought to be- but one or two. The air 
is like that of the Black Hole of Calcutta. As the air 
swept through the wicket, it almost knocked me down. 
1^0 sunlight. Young men who had committed their 
first crime crowded in among old ofienders. I saw there 



94 



NICfHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



one woman, with a child ahnost blind, who had been 
arrested for the crime of poverty, who was waiting until 
the slow law could take her to the almshouse, where she 
rightfully belonged; but she was thrust in there with her 
child amid the most abandoned wretches of the town. 
Many of the offenders m that prison sleeping on the 
floor, with nothing but a vermin-covered blanket over 
them Those people crowded and wan and wasted and 
half suffocated and Infuriated. 1 said to the men, ''IIow 
do you stand it here?'^ ^'God knows,'* said one man, 
"we have to stand it." Oh, they will pay you when they 
get out. Where they burned down one house they will 
burn three. They will strike deeper the assassin's knife. 
They are this minute plotting worse burglaries. Ray- 
mond Street Jail is the best place I know of to manu- 
facture foot-pads, vagabonds, and cut-throats. Yale 
College is not so well calculated to make, scholars, nor 
Harvard so well calculated to make scientists, nor Prince 
ton so well calculated to make theologians, as Raymond 
Street Jail is calculated to make criminals. All that 
those men do not know of crime after they have been in 
that dungeon for some time, Satanic machination cannot 
teach them. Every hour that jail stands, it challenges 
the Lord Almighty to smite this city. I call upon the 
people to rise in their wrath and demand a reformation 
1 call upon the judges of our courts to expose that 
infamy. I call upon the Legislature of the State of New 
York, now in session, to examine and appease that out- 
rage on God and human society. I demand, in behalf 
of those incarcerated prisoners, tresh- air and clear sun- 
light, and, in the name of him who had not where to lay 
his head, a couch to rest on at night. In the insuffer- 
able stench and sickening surroundings of that Raymond 
Street Jail there is nothing but disease for the body, 



PEOPLE TO BE FEAKED. 



95 



idiocy for the mind, and death for the soul. Stifled air 
and darkness and vermin never turned a thief into an 
honest man. 

We want men like John Howard and Sir William 
Blackstone, and women like Elizabeth Fry, to do for the 
prisons of the United States what those people did in 
other days for the prisons of England. I thank God for 
what Isaac T. Hopper and Dr. Wines and Mr. Harris 
and scores of others have done in the way of prison 
reform; but we want something more radical before 
upon this city will come the blessing of him who said : 
" I was in prison, and ye came unto me." 

Again, in this class of uprooting and devouring popu- 
lation are iintrustworthy officials. " Woe unto thee, O 
land, when thy kings and child, and thy princes drink 
in the morning," It is a great calamity to a city when 
bad men get into public authority. Why was it 
that in l^ew York there was such unparalleled crime 
between 1866 and 1871 ? It was because the judges of 
police in that city, for the most part, were as corrupt as 
the vagabonds that came before them for trial. Those 
were the days of high carnival for election frauds, assas- 
sination and forgery. We had the Whisky Ring," and 
the " Tamman}^ Ring," and the ''Erie Ring." There 
was one man during those years that got one hundred 
and twenty-eight thousand dollars in one year for serving 
the public. In a few years it was- estimated that there 
were fifty millions of public treasure squandered. In 
those times the criminal had only to wink to the judge, 
or his lawyer would wink for him, and the question was 
decided for the defendant. Of the eight thousand people 
arrested in that city in one year, only three thousand 
were punished. These little matters were fixed up," 
while the interests of society were "fixed down." You 



96 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



know as well as I that a criminal who escapes only opens 
the door for other criminalities. "When the two pick- 
pockets snatched the diamond pin from the Brooklyn 
gentleman in a Broadway stage, and the villains were 
arrested, and the trial was set down for the General Ses- 
sions, and then the trial never came, and never anything 
more was heard of the case, the public officials were only 
bidding higher for more crime. It is no compliment to 
public authority when we have in all the cities of the 
country, walking abroad, men and women notorious for 
criminality^ unwhipped of justice. They are pointed 
out to you in the street day by day. There yoa find 
what are called the ''fences," the men who stand between 
the thief and the honest man, sheltering the thief and 
at a great price handing over the goods to the owner to 
whom they belong. There yon will find those who are 
called the "skinners," the men who hover around Wall 
street, with great sleight of hand in bonds and stocks. 
There you find the funeral thieves, the people who go 
and sit down and mourn with families and pick their 
pockets. And there you find the "confidence nieii,'^ 
who borrow money of you because they have a dead 
child in the house and want to bury it, when thej never 
had a house nor a family; or they want to go to England 
and get a large property there, and they want you lo pjiy 
their way, and thej^ will send the money back by the 
very next mail. There are the "harbor thieves," the 
"shoplifters," the "pickpockets," famous all over the 
cities. Hundreds of them with their faces in the 
"Rogues' G-allery," yet doing nothing for the last five 
or ten years but defraud society and escape justice. 
"When these people go unarrested and unpunished, ]t is 
putting a high premium upon vice, and saying to the 
young criminals of this country, "What a safe thing it is 



PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 



97 



to be a great criminal." Let the law swoop upon them. 
Let it be known in this country that crime will have no 
quarter, that the detectives are after it, that the police 
club is being brandished, that the iron door of the prison 
is being opened, that the judge is ready to call on the 
case. Too great leniency to criminals is too great 
severity to society. When the President pardoned the 
wholesale dealer in obscene books he hindered the cru- 
sade against licentiousness; but when Governor Dix 
refused to let go Foster, the assassin, who was condemned 
to the gallows, he grandly vindicated the laws of God 
and the dignity of the State of New York. 

Again: among the uprooting and devouring classes in 
our midst are the idle. Of course, I do not refer to peo- 
ple who are getting old, or to the sick, or to those who 
cannot get work ; but I tel] you to look out for those ath- 
letic men and women who will not work. When the 
French nobleman was asked why he kept busy when he 
had so large a property, he said, " I keep on engraving 
so I may not hang myself." I do not care who the man 
is, you cannot afford to be idle. It is from the idle classes 
that the criminal classes are made up. Character, like 
water, gets putrid if it stands still too long. Who can 
wonder that in this world, where there is so much to do, 
and all the hosts of earth and heaven and hell are plung- 
ing into the conflict, and angels are flying, and God 
is at work, and the universe is a-quake with the march- 
ing and counter-marching, that God lets his indignation 
fall upon a man who chooses idleness ? I have watched 
these do-nothings who spend their time stroking their 
beard, and retouching their toilette., and criticising 
industrious people, and pass their days and nights in bar- 
rooms and club houses, lounging and smoking and chew- 
ing and card-paying. They are not only useless, but they 
7 



98 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



are dangerous. How hard it is for thera to while away 
the hours? 

Alas ! for them. If they do not know how to while away 
an hour, what will they do when they have all eternity 
on their hands ? These men for a while smoke the best 
cigars, and wear the best broadcloth, and move in the 
highest spheres; but I have noticed that very soon they 
come down to the prison, the almshouse, or stop at the 
gallows. 

The pplice stations of this cluster of cities furnish 
annually two hundred thousand lodgings. For the most 
part, these two hundred thousand lodgings are furnished 
to able-bodied men and women — people as able to work 
as you and I are. When they are received no longer at 
one police station, because they are "repeaters," they go 
to some other station, and so they keep moving around. 
They get their food at house doors, stealing what they 
can lay their hands on in the front basement while the 
servant is spreading the bread in the back basement. 
They will not work. Time and again, in the country 
districts, they have wanted hundreds and thousands of 
laborers. These men will not go. They do not want to 
work. I have tried them. I have set them to sawing 
wood in my cellar, to see whether they wanted to work. 
I offered to pay them well for it. I have heard the saw 
going for about three minutes, and then I went down, 
and lo, the wood, but no saw ! They are the pest of so- 
ciety, and they stand in the way of the Lord's poor, who 
ought to be helped, and must be helped, and will be 
helped. While there are thousands of industrious men 
who cannot get any v/ork, these men who do not want 
any work come in and make that plea. I am in favor of 
the restoration of the old-fashioned whipping-post for 
just this one class of men who will not work; sleeping at 



PEOPLE TO BE FEABED. 



99 



night at public expense in the station house; during the 
daj, getting their food at your door-step. Imprison- 
ment does not scare them. They would like it. Black- 
well's Island or Sing Sing would be a comfortablehome 
for them. They would have no objection to the alms- 
house, for they like thin soup, if they cannot get mock- 
turtle. I propose this for them: on one side of them put 
some healthy work; on the other side put a raw-hide, and 
let them take their choice. I like for that class of peo- 
ple the scant bill of fare that Paul wrote out for the 
Thessalonian loafers: ''If any work not, neither should 
he eat." By what law of God or man is it right that 
you and I should toil day in and day out, until our hands 
are blistered and our arms ache and our brain gets numb, 
and then be called upon to support what in the United 
States are about two million loafers? They are a very 
dangerous class. Let the public authorities keep their 
eyes on them. 

Again: among the uprooting classes I place the op- 
jyressed poor. Poverty to a certain extent is chastening; 
but after that, when it drives a man to the wall, and he 
hears his children cry in vain for bread, it sometimes 
makes him desperate. I think that there are thousands of 
honest men lacerated into vagabondism. There are men 
crushed under burdens for which they are not half paid. 
While there is no excuse for criminality, even in oppres- 
sion, I state it as a simple fact that much of the scoun- 
drelism of the community is consequent upon ill-treat- 
ment. There are many men and women battered and 
bruised and stung until the hour of despair has come, and 
they stand with the ferocity of a wild beast which, pur- 
sued until it can run no longer, turns round, foaming 
and bleeding, to fight the hounds. 

There is a vast underground New York ana Brooklyn 



100 



NIGHT SIDES OF dTY LIFE. 



life that is appalling and shameful. It wallows and 
steams with putrefaction. You go down the stairs, 
which are wet and decayed with filth, and at the bottom you 
find the poor victims on the floor, cold, sick, three-fourths 
dead, slinking into a still darker corner under the gleam 
of the lantern of the police. There has not been a breath 
of fresh air in that room for five years, literally. The 
broken sewer empties its contents upon them, and they 
lie at night in the swimming filth. There they are, men, 
women, children; blacks, whites; Mary Magdalen with- 
out her repentance, and Lazarus without his God I 
These are " the dives " into which the pick-pockets and 
the thieves go, as well as a great many who would like a 
different life but cannot get it. These places are the sores 
of the city, which bleed perpetual corruption. They are. 
the underlying volcano that threatens us with a Oaraccas 
earthquake. It rolls and roars and surges and heaves 
and rocks and blasphemes and dies. And there are only 
two outlets for it: the police court and the Potter's Field. 
In other words, they must either go to prison or to hell. 
Oh, you never saw it you say. You never will see it until 
on the day when those staggering wretches shall come 
up in the light of the judgment throne, and while all 
hearts are being revealed God will ask you what you did 
to help them. 

There is another layer of poverty and destitution, no- 
so squalid, but almost as helpless. You hear the inces- 
sant wailing for bread and clothes and fire. Their eyes 
are sunken. Their cheek-bones stand out. Their hands 
are dami) with slow consumption. Their flesh is puffed 
up with dropsies. Their breath is like that of the char- 
nel-house. They hear the roar of the wheels of fashion 
over head, and the gay laughter of men and maidens, and 
wonder why God gave to others so much and to them so 



PEOPLE TO BE FEA.BED. 



101 



little. Some of them thrust into an infidelity like that of 
the poor German girl who, when told in the midst of her 
wretchedness that God was good, said; "I^'o, no good 
God. Just look at me. No good God." 

In this cluster of cities, whose cry of want I this day 
interpret, there are said to be, as far as I can figure it up 
from the reports, about two hundred and ninety thous- 
and honest poor who are dependent upon individual, city, 
and state charities. If all their voices could come up at 
once, it would be a groan that would shake the founda- 
tions of the city, and brinsj all earth and heaven to the 
rescue. But, for the most part, it sufiers unexpressed. 
It sits in silence, gnashing its teeth, and sucking the 
blood of its own arteries, waiting for the judgment day. 
Oh, I should not wonder if on that day it would be found 
out that some of us had some things that belonged to 
them; some extra garment which might have made them 
comfortable in these cold days; some bread thrust into 
the ash-barrel that might have appeased their hunger 
for a little while; some wasted candle or gas-jet that 
might have kindled up their darkness; some fresco on 
the ceiling that would have given them a roof; some 
jewel which, brought to that orphan girl in time, might 
have kept her from being crowded off the precipices of 
an unclean life ; some JSTew Testament that would have 
told them of him who " came to seek and save that 
which was lost.'' Oh, this wave of vagrancy and hunger 
and nakedness that dashes against our front door step; 
I wonder if you hear it and see it as much as I hear it 
and see it. This last week I have been almost frenzied 
with the perpetual cry for help from all classes and from 
all nations, knocking, knocking, ringing, ringing, until 
I dare not have more than one decent pair of shoes, nor 
more than one decent coat, nor more than one decent 



102 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



hat, lest in the last day it be found that I have some- 
thing that belongs to them, and Christ shall turn to me 
and say: " Inasmuch as ye did it not to these, ye did it 
not to me." If the roofs of all the houses of destitution 
could be lifted so we could look down into them just as 
God looks, whose nerves would be strong enough to 
stand it? And yet there they are. The forty -five thous- 
and sewing- women in these three cities, some of them in 
hunger and cold, working night after night, until some- 
times the blood spurts from nostril and lip. How well 
their grief was voiced by that despairing, woman who 
stood by her invalid husband and invalid child, and said 
to the city missionary: "I am down-hearted. Every- 
thing's against us ; and then there are other things." 
*' What other things?" said the city missionary. " Oh," 
she replied, " my sin." " What do you mean by that?" 
" Well," she said, " I never hear or see anything good 
It's work from Monday morning to Saturday night, and 
then when Sunday comes I can't go out, and I walk the 
floor, and it makes me tremble to think that I have got to 
meet God. O sir, it's so hard for us. We have to work 
BO, and then we have so much trouble, and then we are 
getting along so poorly; and see this wee little thing 
growing weaker and weaker; and then to think we are 
not getting nearer to God, but floating away from him 
O sir, I do wish I was ready to die." 

I should not wonder if they had a good deal better 
time than we in the future, to make up for the fact that 
they had such a bad time here. It would be juat like 
Jesus to say: "Come up and take the highest seats. 
You suffered with me on earth; now be glorified with 
me in heaven." O thou weeping One of Bethany! O 
thou dying One of the cross! Have mercy on the starv- 
ing, freezing, homeless poor of these great cities! 



PEOPLE TO BE FEARED. 



103 



I have preached this sermon for four or five practical 
reasons: Because I want you to know who are the up- 
rooting classes of society. Because I want yoii to be 
more discriminating in your charities. Because I want 
j'our hearts open with generosity, and your hands open 
with charity. Because I want you to be made the sworn 
friends of all city evangelization, and all newsboys' 
lodging houses, and all Howard Missions, and Children's 
Aid Societies. Aye, I have preached it because I want 
you this week to send to the Dorcas Society all the' cast- 
off clothing, that under the skillful manipulation of our 
wives and mothers and sisters and daughters, these gar- 
ments may be fitted on the cold, bare feet, and on the 
shivering limbs of the destitute. I should not wonder if 
that hat that you give should come back a jeweled coronet, 
of if that garment that you this week hand out from 
your wardrobe should mysteriously be whitened, and 
somehow wrought into the Savior's own robe, so in the 
last day he would run his hand over it, and say : " I was 
naked, and ye clothed me." That would be putting your 
garments to glorious uses. 

But more than that, I have preached the sermon be- 
cause I thought in the contrast you would see how very 
kindly Grod had dealt with you, and I thought that 
thousands of you would go to-day to your comfortable 
homes, and sit at your well-filled tables, and at the warm 
registers, and look at the round faces of your children, 
and that then you would burst into tears at the review 
of God's goodness to you, and that you would go to your 
room this afternoon and lock the door, and kneel down, 
and say: "O Lord, I have been an ingrate; make me 
thy child. O Lord, there are so many hungry and un- 
clad and unsheltered to-day, I thank thee that all my life 
thou hast taken such good care of me. O Lord, there 



104 



JSIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



are so many sick and crippled children to-day, I thank 
thee mine are well, some of them on earth, some of them 
in heaven. Thy goodness, O Lord, breaks me down. 
Take me once, and forever. Sprinkled as I was many 
years ago at the altar, while my mother held me, now I 
consecrate my soul to thee in a holier baptism of repent- 
ing tears. 

" For sinners, Lord, Thou cam'st to bleed, 
And l\m a sinner vile indeed; 
Lord, I believe Thy grace is free, . 
O magnify that grace in me. " 



THE WOKSHIP OF THE GOLDEN OAI,F. 



105 



CHAPTEE YIII. 

THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN" CALF. 

*' And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the 
lire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and 
made the children of Israel drink of it."— Exodus xxxii: 20. 

People will have a god of some kind, and they prefer 
one of their own making. Here come the Israelites, 
breaking off their golden earrings, the men as well as 
the women, for in those times there were masculine as 
well as feminine decorations. Where did they get these 
beautiful gold earrings, coming up as they did from the 
desert? Oh, they "borrowed" them of the Egyptians 
when they left Egypt. These earrings are piled up into 
a pyramid of glittering beauty. Any more earrings 
to bring ?" says Aaron. None. Fire is kindled ; the 
earrings are melted and poured into a mold, not of an 
eagle or a war charger, but of a calf ; the gold cools off; 
the mold is taken away, and the idol is set up on its 
four legs. An altar is built in front of the shining calf. 
Then the people throw up their arms, and gyrate, and 
shriek, and dance mightily, and worship. Moses has 
been six weeks on Mount Sinai, and he comes back and 
hears the howling and sees the dancing of these golden- 
calf fanatics, and he loses his patience, and he takes the 
two plates of stone on which were written the Ten Com- 
mandments and flings them so hard against a rock that 
they split all to pieces. When a man gets mad he is 
very apt to break all the Ten Commandments! Moses 
rushes in and he takes this calf-god and throws it into a 



106 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



hot fire, until it is melted all out of shape, and then 
pulverizes it — not by the modern appliance of nitro- 
muriatic acid, but by the ancient appliance of nitre, or 
by the old-fashioned file. He makes for the people a 
most nauseating draught. He takes this pulverized 
golden calf and throws it in the only brook which is ac- 
cessible, and the people are compelled to drink of that 
brook or not drink at all. But they did not drink all the 
glittering stuff thrown on the surface. Some of it fiows 
on down the surface of the brook to the river, and then 
fiows on down the river to the sea, and the sea takes it 
up and bears it to the mouth of all the rivers, and when 
the tides set back, the remains of this golden calf are car- 
ried up into the Hudson, and the East river, and the 
Thames, and the Clyde, and the Tiber, and men go out 
and they skim the glittering surface, and they bring it 
ashore and they make another golden calf, and California 
and Australia break off their golden earrings to augment 
the pile, and in the fires of financial excitement and 
straggle all these things are melted together, and while 
we stand looking and wondering what will come of it, 
lo! we find that the golden calf of Israelitish worship 
has become the golden calf of European and American 
worship. 

I shall describe to you the god spoken of in the text, 
his temple, his altar of sacrifice, the music that is made 
in his temple, and then the final breaking up of the whole 
congregation of idolaters. 

Put aside this curtain and you see the golden calf of 
modern idolatry. It is not like other idols, made out of 
stocks or stone, but it has an ear so sensitive that it can 
hear the whispers on Wall street and Third street and 
State street, and the footfalls in the Bank of England, 
and the flutter of a Frenchman's heart on the Bourse. 



THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. lOT 

It has an eje so keen that it can see the rust on the farm 
of Michigan wheat and the insect in the Maryland 
peach- orchard, and the trampled grain under the hoof of 
the Kussian war charger. It is so mighty that it swings 
any way it will the world's shipping. It has its foot on 
alPthe merchantmen and the steamers. It started the 
American Civil War, and under God stopped it, and it 
will decide the Turko-Eussian contest. One broker in 
September, 1869, in New York, shouted, '^One hundred 
and sixty for a million!" and the whole continent shiv- 
ered. This golden calf of the text has its right front 
foot in ISTew York, its left front foot in Chicago, its right 
back foot in Charleston, its left back foot in New Orleans, 
and when it shakes itself it shakes the world. Oh! this 
is a mighty god — the golden calf of the world's worship. 

But every god must have its temple, and this golden 
calf of the text is no exception. Its temple is vaster 
than St. Paul's of the English, and St. Peter's of the 
Italians, and the Alhambra of the Spaniards, and the 
Parthenon of the Greeks, and the Mahal Taj of the 
Hindoos, and all the other cathedrals put together. Its 
pillars are grooved and fluted with gold, and its ribbed 
arches are hovering gold, and its chandeliers are descend- 
ing gold, and its floors are tesselated gold, and its vaults 
are crowded heaps of gold, and its spires and domes are 
soaring gold, and its organ pipes are resounding gold, 
and its pedals are tramping gold, and its stops pulled 
out are flashing gold, while standing at the head of the 
temple, as the presiding deity, are the hoofs and shoul- 
ders and eyes and ears and nostrils of the calf of gold. 

Further: every god must have not only its temple, but 
its altar of sacrifice, and this golden calf of the text is 
no exception. Its altar is not made out of stone as other 
altars, but out of counting-room desks and fire-proof 



108 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



safes, and it is a broad, a long, a high altar. The vic- 
tims sacrificed on it are the Swartouts, and the Ketchams, 
and the Fisks, and the Tweeds, and the Mortons, and ten 
thousand other people who are slain before thi's golden 
calf. What does this god care about the groans and 
struggles of the victims before it? With cold, metallic 
eje it looks on and jet lets thera suffer. Oh ! heaven 
and earth, what an altar! what a sacrifice of body, mind, 
and soul! The physical health of a great multitude is 
flung on this sacrificial altar. They cannot sleep, and 
they take chloral and morphine and intoxicants. Some 
of them struggle in a nightmare of stocks, and at one 
o'clock in the morning suddenly rise up shouting: "A 
thousand shares of ISTew York Central—one hundred 
and eight and a-half ! take it!" until the whole family is 
affrighted, and the speculators fall back on their pillows 
and sleep until they are awakened again by a " corner " 
in the Pacific Mail, or a sudden "rise" of Rock Island. 
Their nerves gone, their digestion gone, their brain 
gone, they die. The clergyman comes in and reads the 
funeral service: "Blessed are the dead who die in the 
Lord." Mistake. They did not " die in the Lord;" the 
golden calf kicked them! 

• The trouble is, when men sacrifice themselves on this 
altar suggested in the text, they not only sacrifice them- 
selves, but they sacrifice their families. If a man by an 
ill course is determined to go to perdition, I suppose 
you will have to let him go; but he puts his wife and 
children in an equipage that is the amazement of the 
avenues, and the driver lashes the horses into two whirl- 
winds, and the spokes flash in the sun, and the golden 
headgear of the harness gleams, until Black Calamity 
takes the bits of the horses and stops them, and shouts 
to the luxuriant occupants of the equipage: "Get out!" 



THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 



109 



They get out. They get down. That husband and 
father flung his family so hard they never got up again. 
There was the mark on them for life — the mark of a 
split hoof — the death-dealing hoof of the golden calf. 

^olomon offered in one sacrifice, on one occasion, 
twenty-two thousand oxen and one hundred and twenty 
thousand sheep; but that was a tame sacrifice compared 
with the multitude of men who are sacrificing them- 
selves on this altar of the golden calf, and sacrificing 
their families with them. The soldiers of General 
Havelock, in India, walked literally ankle deep in the 
blood of the "house of massacre," where two hun- 
dred women and children had been slain by the Sepoys; 
but the blood around about this altar of the golden calf 
flows up to the knee, flows to the girdle, flows to the 
shoulder, flows to the lip. Great God of heaven and 
earth, have mercy! The golden calf has none. 

Still the degrading worship goes on, and the devotees 
kneel and kiss the dust, and count their golden beads, 
and cross themselves with the blood of their own sacri- 
fice. The music rolls on under the arches; it is made 
of clinking sUver and clinking gold, and the rattling 
specie of the banks and brokers' shops, and the voices 
of all the exchanges. The soprano of the worship is 
carried by the timid voices of men who have just begun 
to speculate; while the deep bass rolls out from those 
who for ten years of iniquity have been doubly damned. 
Chorus of voices rejoicing over what they have made. 
Chorus of voices wailing over what they have lost. 
This temple of which I speak stands open day and 
night, and there is the glittering god with his four feet 
on broken hearts, and there is tiie smoking altar of sac- 
rifice, new victims every moment on it, and there are 
the kneeling devotees; and the doxology of the worship 



110 



NIGHT SIDB:S of CITY LIFE. 



rolls on, while Death stands with mouldy and skeleton 
arm beating time for the chorus — "More! more! more!" 

Some people are very much surprised at the actions 
of folk in the Stock Exchange, New York, Indeed, it 
is a scene sometimes that paralyzes description, and is 
beyond the imagination of any one who has never looked 
in. What snajDping of finger and thumb and wild ges- 
ticulation, and raving like hyenas, and stamping like 
buffaloes, and swaying to and fro, and jostling and run- 
ning one upon another, and deafening uproar, until the 
president of the Exchange strikes with his mallet four 
or five times, crying, "Order! order!" and the aston- 
ished spectator goes out into the fresh air feeling that he 
has escaped from pandemonium. What does it all 
mean? I will tell you what it means. The devotees of 
every heathen temple cut themselves to pieces, and yell 
and gyrate. This vociferation and gyration of the Stock 
Exchange is all appropriate. This is the worship of the 
golden calf. 

But my text suggests that this worship must be broken 
up, as the behavior of Moses in my text indicated. 
There are those who say that this golden calf spoken of 
in my text was hollow, and merely plated with gold; 
otherwise, they say, Moses could not have carried it. I 
do not know that; but somehow, perhaps by the assist- 
ance of his friends, he takes up this golden calf, which 
is an open insult to God and man, and throws it into the 
fire, and it is melted, and then it comes out and is cooled 
off, and by some chemical appliance, or by an old-fash- 
ioned file, it is pulverized, and it is thrown into the 
brook, and, as a punishment, the people are compelled 
to drink the nauseating stuff. So, my hearers, you may 
depend upon it that Grod will burn and he will grind to 
pieces the golden calf of modern idolatry, and he will 



THE W(>KSHTP OF THE GOLDEN OALF. 



Ill 



compel the people in their agony to drink it. If not 
before, it will be so on the last day. I know not where 
the fire will begin, whether at the " Battery " or Central 
Park, whether at Fulton Ferry or at Bushwick, whether 
at Shoreditch, London, or West End ; but it will be a very 
hot blaze. All the Government securities of the DTnited 
States and Great Britain will curl up in the first blast. 
All the money safes and depositing vaults will melt 
under the first touch. The sea will burn like tinder, 
and the shipping will be abandoned forever. The melt- 
ing gold in the broker's window will burst through the 
melted window-glass and into the street; but the .flying 
population will not stop to scoop it up. The cry of 
" Fire " from the mountain will be answered by the cry 
of "Fire" in the plain. The confLagration will burn 
out from the continent toward the sea, and then burn in 
from the sea toward the land. New York and London 
with one cut of the red scythe of destruction will go 
down. Twenty-five thousand miles of conflagration! 
The earth will wrap itself round and round in shroud of 
flame, and lie down to perish. What then will become 
of your golden calf ? Who then so poor as to worship 
it? Melted, or between the upper and the nether mill- 
stone of falling mountains ground to powder. Dagon 
down. Moloch down. Juggernaut down. Golden calf 
down. ^ 

But, my friends, every day is a day of judgment, and 
God is all the time grinding to pieces the golden calf. 
Merchants of New York and London, what is the char- 
acteristic of this time in which we live? "Bad," you 
say. Professional men, what is the characteristic of the 
times in which we live ? " Bad," you say. Though I 
should be in a minority of one, I venture the opinion 
that these are the best times we have had in fifteen 



« 



112 NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 

years, for tlie reason that God is teaching the world, as 
never before, that old-fashioned honesty is the only thing 
that will stand. In the past few months we have learned 
as never before that forgeries will not pay; that the 
watering of stock will not pay; that the spending of fifty 
thousand dollars on country seats and a palatial city resi- 
dence, when there are only thirty thousand dollars income, 
will not pay; that the appropriation of trust funds to our 
own private speculation will not pay. We had a great na- 
tional tumor, in the shape of fictitious prosperity. We 
called it national enlargement; instead of calling it en- 
largement, we might better have called it a swelling. It 
has been a tumor, and God is cutting it out — has cut it 
out, and the nation will get well and will come back to the 
principles of our fathers and grandfathers when twice 
three made six instead of sixty, and when the apples at 
the bottom of the barrel were just as good as the apples 
on the top of the barrel, and a silk handkerchief was not 
half cotton, and a man who wore a five-dollar coat paid 
for was more honored than a man who wore a fifty-dollar 
coat not paid for. 

The golden calf of our day, like the one of the text, is 
very apt to be made out of borrowed gold. These 
Israelites of the text borrowed the earrings of the Egyp- 
tians, and then melted them into a god. That is the 
way the golden calf is made nowadays. A great many 
housekeepers, not paying for the articles they get, bor- 
row of the grocer and the baker and the butcher and the 
dry-goods seller. Then the retailer borrows of the whole- 
sale dealer. Then the wholesale dealer borrows of the 
capitalist, and we borrow, and borrow, and borrow, until 
the community is divided into two classes, those who 
borrow and those who are borrowed of; and after a 
while the capitalist wants his money and he rushes upon 



THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 



113 



the wholesale dealer, and the wholesale dealer wants his 
money and he rushes npon the retailer, and the retailer 
wants his money and he rushes npon the consumer, and 
we all go down together. There is many a man in this 
day who rides in a carriage and owes the blacksmith for 
the tire, and the wheelwright for the wheel, and the 
trimmer for the curtain, and the driver for unpaid wages, 
and the harness- maker for the bridle, and the furrier for 
the robe, while from the tip of the carriage tongue clear 
back to the tip of the camel's-hair shawl fluttering out 
of the back of the vehicle, everything is paid for by notes 
that have been three times renewed. 

I tell you, sirs, that in this country we will never get 
things right until we stop borrowing, and pay as we go. 
It is this temptation to borrow, and borrow, and borrow, 
that keeps the people everlastingly praying to the golden 
calf for help, and just at the minute they expect the help 
the golden calf treads on them. The judgments of God, 
like Moses in the text, will rush in and break up this 
worship; and I say, let the work go on until every man 
shall learn to speak truth with his neighbor, and those 
who make engagements shall feel themselves bound to 
keep them, and when a man who will not repent of his 
business iniquity, but goes on wishing to satiate his can- 
nibal appetite by devouring widows' houses, shall, by 
the law of the land, be compelled to exchange the brown 
stone front on Madison Avenue or Beacon Hill for ITew- 
gate or Sing Sing. Let the golden calf perish! 

But, my friends, if we have made this world our god, 
when we come to die we will see our idol demolished. 
How much of this world are you going to take with you 
into the next ? Will you have two pockets — one in each 
side of your shroud? Will you cushion your coffin with 
bonds and mortsjas^es and certificates of stock? Ah! no 



114 



NiaHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



The ferry- at that crosses this Jordan takes no baggage 
— ^nothing heavier than a spirit. You may, perhaps, 
take five hundred dollars with you two or three miles, 
in the shape of funeral trappings, to Greenwood, but you 
will have to leave them there. It would not be safe for 
you to lie down there with a gold watch or a diamond 
riug; it would be a temptation to the pillagers. Ah, 
my friends ! if we have made this world our god, when 
we die we will see our idol ground to pieces by our 
pillow, and we will have to drink it in bitter regrets for 
the wasted opportunities of a lifetime. Soon we will be 
gone. O ! this is a fleeting world, it is a dying world. 
A man who had worshiped it all his days in his dying 
moment described himself when he said; " Fool! fool! 
fool!" 

I want you to change temples, and to give up the wor- 
ship of this unsatisfying and cruel god for the service of 
the Lord Jesus Christ. Here is the gold that will never 
crumble. Here are securities that will never fail. Here 
are banks that will never break. Here is an altar on 
which there has been one sacrifice once for all. Here is 
a God who will comfort you when you are in trouble, 
and soothe you when you are sick, and save you when 
you die. When your parents have breathed their last, 
and the old, wrinkled, and trembling hands can no more 
be put upon your head for a blessing, he will be to you 
father and mother both, giving you the defense of the one 
and the comfort of the other ; and when your children 
go away from you, the sweet darlings, you will not kiss 
them good-by for ever. He only wants to hold them for 
you a little while. He will give them back to you again, 
and he will have them all waiting for you at the gates 
of eternal welcome. Oh! what a God he is! He will 
allow you to come so close this morning that you can 



THE WOKS HIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF. 



115 



put your arms around his neck, while he in response 
will put his arms around jour neck, and all the windows 
of heaven will be hoisted to let the redeemed look out 
and see the spectacle of a rejoicing Father and a returned 
prodigal locked in glorious embrace. Quit worshiping 
the golden calf, and bow this day before him in whose 
presence we must all appear when the world has turned 
to ashes and the scorched parchment of the sky shall be 
rolled together like an historic scroll. 



116 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



CHAPTER IX. 

DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 

"Whose adorning, let it not be putting on of apparel." — 

1 Peter iii: a 

My subject is dry-goods religion. That we should Jv,l 
be clad, is proved by the opening of the first wardrobe i?i 
Paradise, with its apparel of dark green. That we should 
all, as far as our means allow us, be beautifully and grace- 
fully appareled, is proved by the fact that God never 
made a wave but he gilded it with golden sunbeams, or 
a tree but he garlanded it with blossoms, or a sky but 
he studded it with stars, or allowed even the smoke of a 
furnace to ascend but he columned and turreted aad 
domed and scrolled it into outlines of indescribable 
gracefulness. When I see the apple-orchards of the 
spring and the pageantry of the autumnal forests, I come 
to the conclusion that if nature ever does join the Church, 
while she may be a Quaker in the silence of her worship, 
she never will be a Quaker in the style of her dress- 
Why the notches of a fern leaf, or the stamen of a water 
lily ? Why, when the day departs, does it let the folding- 
doors of heaven stay open so long, when it might go in 
so quickly? One summer morning I saw an army of a 
million spears, each one adorned with a diamond of tLe 
first water — I mean the grass with the dew on it. When 
the prodigal came home his father not only put a coat 
on his back, but jewelry on his hand. Christ wore a 
beard. Paul, the bachelor apostle, not afflicted with any 
sentimentality, admired the arrangement of a woman's 



DRY-GOODS RELIGION. 



117 



hair when he said, in his epistle, " if a woman have long 
hair, it is a glory unto her." There will be fashion in 
heaven as on earth, but it will be a different kind of 
fashion. It will decide the color of the dress; and the 
population of that country, by a beautiful law, will wear 
white. I say these things as a background to my ser- 
mon, to show you that I have no prim, precise, prudish, 
or cast-iron theories on the subject of human apparel. 
But the goddess of fashion has set up her throne in this 
cour' y, and at the sound of the timbrels we are all ex- 
pected to fall down and worship. • The old and new tes- 
tament oi her bible are Madame Demoresfs Magazine 
and Harder* s Bazar. Her altars smoke with the sac- 
rifice of the bodies, minds, and souls of ten thousand vic- 
tims. In her temple four people stand in the organ-loft, 
and from them there comes down a cold drizzle of music, 
freezing on the ears of her worshipers. This goddess 
of fashion has become a rival of the Lord of heaven and 
eartli, and it is high time that we unlimbered our bat- 
teries against this idolatry. When I come to count the 
victims of fashion I find as many masculine as feminine. 
Men make i easy tirade against woman, as though she 
were the chief worshiper at this idolatrous shrine, and 
no doubt some men in the more conspicuous part of the 
pew have already cast glances at the more retired part 
of the pew, their look a prophecy of a generous distribu- 
tion to others of the more cogent parts of my discourse. 
My sermon shall be as appropriate for one end of the 
pew as for the other. 

Men are as much the idolators of fashion as women, 
but they sacrifice on a different part of the altar. "With 
men, the fashion goes to cigars and club-rooms and yacht- 
ing parties and wine suppers. In the United States the 
men chew up and smoke one hundred millions of dol- 



118 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



lars' worth of tobacco every year. That is their fashion. 
In London, no't long ago, a man died who started in life 
with seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but he ate 
it all up in gluttonies, sending his agents to all parts of 
the earth for some rare delicacy for the palate, some- 
times one plate of food costing him three or four hun- 
dred dollars. He ate up his whole fortune, and had only 
one guinea left; with that he bought a woodcock, and 
had it dressed in the very best style, ate it, gave two 
hours for digestion, then walked out on Westminster 
Bridge and threw himself into the Thames, and died, 
doing on a large scale what you and I have often seen 
done on a small scale. But men do not abstain from 
millinery and elaboration of skirt through any superi- 
ority of humility. It is only because such appendages 
would be a blockade to business. What would sashes 
and trains three and a half yards long do in a stock mar- 
ket? And yet men are the disciples of fashion just as 
much as women. Some of them wear boots so tight they 
can hardly walk in the paths of righteousness. And 
there are men who buy expensive suits of clothes and 
never pay for them, and who go through the streets in 
great stripes of color like ani mated checker-boards. Then 
there are multitudes of men who, not satisfied with the 
bodies the Lord gave them, are padded so that their 
shoulders shall be square, carrying around a small cot- 
ton plantation. And I understand a great many of them 
now paint their eyebrows and their lips, and I have heard 
from good authority that there are multitudes of men in 
Brooklyn and JSTew York — men — things have got to such 
an awful pass — multitudes of men wearing corsets! I 
say these things because I want to show you that I am 
impartial in my discourse, and that both sexes, in the 
language of the Surrogate's office, shall "share and share 



DRY- GOODS RELIGION. 



119 



alike." As God maj help me, I shall show you what 
are the destroying and deathfiil influences of inordinate 
fashion. 

^The first baleful influence I notice is in fraud, ill- 
imitable and ghastly. Do you know that Arnold of 
the Kevolution proposed to sell his country in order to 
get money to support his wife's wardrobe? I declare 
here before God and this people that the effort to keep 
up expensive establishments in this country is sending 
more business men to temporal perdition than all other 
causes combined. What was it that sent Gilman to the 
penitentiary, and Philadelphia Morton to the watering 
of stocks, and the life insurance presidents to perjured 
statements about their assets, and has completely upset 
our American finances? What was it that overthrew 
Belknap, the United States Secretary at Washington, the 
crash of whose fall shook the continent? But why should 
I go to these famous defaultings to show what men will 
do in order to keep up great home style and expensive 
wardrobe, when you and I know scores of men who are 
put to their wit's end, and are lashed from January to 
December in the attempt. Our Washington politicians 
may theorize until the expiration of their terms of office 
as to the best way of improving our monetary condition 
in this country; it will be of no use, and things will be 
no better until we learn to put on our heads, and backs, 
and feet, and hands no more than we can pay for. 

There are clerks in stores and banks on limited sal- 
aries, who, in the vain attempt to keep the wardrobe of 
their family as showy as other folk's wardrobes, are 
dying of mufi's, and diamonds, and camel's hair shawls, 
and high hats, and they have nothing left except what 
they give to cigars and wine suppers, and they die before 
their time and they will expect us ministers to preach 



120 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



about them as though they were the victims oi early- 
piety, and after a high-class funeral, with silver handles 
at the side of their coffin, of extraordinary brightness, it 
will be found out that the undertaker is cheated out of 
his legitimate expenses ! Do not send to me to preach 
the funeral sermon of a man who dies like that. I will 
blurt out the whole truth, and tell that he was strangled 
to death by his wife's ribbons! The country is dressed 
to death. You are not surprised to find that the put- 
ting up of one public building in 'New York cost mil- 
lions of dollars more than it ought to have cost, when 
you find that the man who gave out the contracts paid 
more than five thousand dollars for his daughter's wed- 
ding dress. Cashmeres of a thousand dollars each are 
not rare on Broadway. It is estimated that there are 
five thousand women in these two cities who have ex- 
pended on their personal array two thousand dollars a 
year. 

What are men to do in order to keep up such home 
wardrobes? Steal — that is the only respectable thing 
they can do! During the last fifteen years there have 
been innumerable fine businesses shipwrecked on the 
wardrobe. The temptation comes in this way: A man 
thinks more of his family than of all the world outside, 
and if they spend the evening in describing to him the 
superior wardrobe of the family across the street, that 
they cannot bear the sight of, the man is thrown on his 
gallantry and his pride of family, and, without translat- 
ing his feelings into plain language, he goes into extor- 
tion and issuing of false stock, and skillful penmanship 
in writing somebody else's name at the foot of a prom- 
issory note; and they all go down together — the husband 
to the prison, the wife to the sewing machine, the chil- 
dren to be taken care of by those who were called poof 



DKY-GOODS RELIGION. 



121 



relations. O! for some new Shakespeare to arise and 
write the tragedy of human clothes. 

>Act the first of the tragedy. — A plain but beautiful 
home. Enter, the newly-married pair. Enter, sim- 
plicity of manner and behavior. Enter, as much hap- 
piness as is ever found in one home. 

Act the second. — Discontent with the humble home. 
Enter, envy. Enter, jealousy. Enter, desire of display. 

Act the third. — Enlargement of expenses. Erter, all 
the queenly dressmakers. Enter, the French milliners. 

Act the fourth. — The tip-top of society. Enter, princes 
and princesses of ^^^ew York life. Enter, magnificent 
plate and equipage. Enter, everything splendid. 

Act the fifth, and last. — Winding up of the scene. 
Enter, the assignee. Enter, the sherifi". Enter, the 
creditors. Enter, humiliation. Enter, the wrath of God. 
Enter, the contempt of society. Enter, death. Now, 
let the silk curtain drop on the stage. The farce is 
ended, and the lights are out. 

Will you forgive me if I say in tersest shape possible 
that some of the men in this country have to forge and 
to perjure and to swindle to pay for their wives' dresses? 
I will say it, whether you forgive me or not! 

Again, inordinate fashion is the foe of all Christian 
alms-giving. Men and women put so much in personal 
display that they often have nothing for God and the 
cause of sufi'ering humanity. A Christian man cracking 
his Palais Royal glove across the back by shutting up 
his hand to hide the one cent he puts into the poor-box! 
A Christian woman, at the story of the Hottentots, cry- 
ing copious tears into a twenty-five dollar handkerchief, 
and then giving a two-cent piece to the collection, 
thrusting it down under the bills so people will not 
know but it was a ten-dollar gold piece! One hundred 



122 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



dollars for incense to fashion. Two cents for God. God 
gives us ninety cents out of every dollar. The other ten 
cents by command of His Bible belong to Him. Is not 
God liberal according to this tithing system laid down 
in the Old Testament — is not God liberal in giving us 
ninety cents out of a dollar, when he takes but ten ? We 
do not like that. We want to have ninety-nine cents for 
ourselves and one for God. 

Now, I would a great deal rather steal ten cents from 
you than God. I think one reason why a great many 
people do not get along in worldly accumulation faster 
is because they do not observe this divine rule. God 
says: ^' "Well, if that man is not satisfied with ninety 
cents of a dollar, then I will take the whole dollar, and I 
will give it to the man or woman who is honest with 
me." The greatest obstacle to charity in the Christian 
church to-day is the fact that men expend so much 
money on their table, and women so much on their 
dress, they have got nothing left for the work of God ard 
the world's betterment. In my first settlement at Belle., 
ville, IS^ew Jersey, the cause of missions was being pre- 
sented one Sabbath, and a plea for the charity of the 
people was. being made, when an old Christian man in 
the audience lost his balance, and said right out in the 
midst of the sermon: "Mr. Talmage, how are we to 
give liberally to these grand and glorious causes when 
our families dress as they do?" I did not answer that 
question. It w^as the only time in my life when I had 
nothing to say! 

Again, inordinate fashion is distraction to public wor- 
ship. You know very well there are a good many peo- 
ple who come to church just as they go to the races, to 
see who will come out first. What a flutter it makes in 
church when some woman with extraordinary display of 



DKY-GOODS RELIGION. 



123 



fashion comes in. "What a love of a bonnet!" says 
someone. " What a perfect fright!" say five hundred. 
For the most merciless critics in the world are fashion 
critics. Men and women with souls to be saved passing 
the hour in wondering where that man got his cravat, or 
what store that woman patronizes. In many of our 
churches the preliminary exercises are taken up with the 
discussion of wardrobes. It is pitiable. Is it not won- 
derful that the Lord does not strike the meeting-houses 
with lightning! What distraction of public worship! 
Dying men and women, whose bodies are soon to be 
turned into dust, yet before three worlds strutting like 
peacocks, the awful question of the soul's destiny sub- 
merged by the question of Creedmore polonaise, and 
navy blue velvet and long fan train skirt, long enough 
to drag up the church aisle, the husband's store, office, 
shop, factory, fortune, and the admiration of half the 
people in the building. Men and women come late to 
church to show their clothes. People sitting down in a 
pew or taking up a* hymn book, all absorbed at the same 
time in personal array, to sing: 

" Rise, my soul, and stretch thy wings. 

Thy better portion trace ; 
Rise from transitory things. 

Toward heaven, thy native place !" 

I adopt the Episcopalian prayer and say: " Good Lord 
deliver us !" 

Insatiate fashion also belittles the intellect. Our 
minds are enlarged or they dwindle just in proportion 
to the importance of the subject on which we constantly 
dwell. Can you imagine anything more dwarfing to 
the human intellect than the study of fashion ? I see 
men on the street who, judging from their elaboration, 
I think must have taken two hours to arrange their 



124 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



apparel. After a few years of that kind of absorption, 
which one of McAllister's magnifying glasses will be 
powerful enough to make the man's character visible? 
What will be left of a woman's intellect after giving 
years and years to the discussion of such questions as 
the comparison between knife-pleats and box-pleats, and 
borderings of grey fox fur or black martin, or the com- 
parative excellence of circulars of repped Antwerp silk 
lined with blue fox fur or with Hudson Bay sable? They 
all land in idiocy. I have seen men at the summer water- 
ing-places, through fashion the mere wreck of what they 
once were. Sallow of cheek. Meagre of limb. Hollow 
at the chest. Showing no animation save in rushing 
across a room to pick up a lady's fan. Simpering along 
the corridors, the same compliments they simpered 
twenty years ago. A l^ew York lawyer last summer 
at United States Hotel, Saratoga, within our hearing, 
rushed across a room to say to a sensible woman, You 
are as sweet as peaches!" The fools of fashion are 
myriad. Fashion not only destroys the body, but it 
makes idiotic the intellect. 

Yet, my friends, I have given you only the milder 
phase of this evil. It shuts a great multitude out of 
heaven. The first peal of thunder that shook Sinai 
declared: Thou shalt have no other God before me," 
and you will have to choose between the goddess of 
fashion and the Christian God. There are a great many 
seats in heaven, and they are all easy seats, but not one 
seat for the devotee of fashion. Heaven is for meek and 
quiet spirits. Heaven is for those who think more of 
their souls than of their bodies. Heaven is for those 
who have more joy in Christian charity than in dry- 
goods religion. Why, if you with your idolatry of 
fashion should somehow get into heaven, you would be 



DRY-GOODS EELIGION. 



125 



for putting a French roof on the " house of many man- 
sions," and making plaits and Hamburg embroidery 
and flounces in the robes, and you would be for intro- 
ducing the patterns of Butterick's Quarterly Delineator. 
Give up this idolatry of fashion, or give up heaven.. 
What would you do standing beside the Countess of 
Huntington, whose joy it was to build chapels for the 
poor, or with that Christian woman of Boston, who fed 
fifteen hundred children of the street at Faneuil Hall on 
^ew Year's Day, giving out as a sort of doxology at the 
end of the meeting a pair of shoes to each one of them ; 
or those Dorcases of modern society who have conse- 
crated their needles to the Lord, and who will get eternal 
reward for every stitch they take. O! men and women,, 
give up the idolatry of fashion. The rivalries and the 
competitions of such a life are a stupendous wretched- 
ness. You will always find some one with brighter array 
and with more palatial residence, and with lavender kid 
gloves that make a tighter fit. And if you buy this 
thing and wear it you will wish you had bought some- 
thing else and worn it. And the frets of such a life will 
bring the crows' feet to your temples before they are due, 
and when you come to die you will have a miserable 
time. I have seen men and women of fashion die, and ^ 
I never saw one of them die well. The trappings off, 
there they lay on the tumbled pillow, and there were just 
two things that bothered them — a wasted life and a com- 
ing eternity. I could not pacify them, for their bodyy 
mind, and soul, had been exhausted in the worship of 
fashion, and they could not appreciate the gospel. When 
I knelt by their bedside they were mumbling out their 
regrets and saying, "O God! O God!" Their garments 
hung up in the wardrobe, never again to be seen by them. 
Without any exception, so far as my memory serves me,. 



126 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



they died without hope, and went into eternity unpre- 
pared. The two most ghastly death-beds on earth are^ 
the one where a man dies of delirium tremens, and the 
other where a woman dies after having sacrificed all 
her faculties of body, mind, and soul in the worship of 
fashion. My friends, we must appear in judgment to 
answer for what we have worn on our bodies as well as 
for what repentances we have exercised with our souls. 
On that day I see coming in Beau Brummel of the last 
century, without his cloak, like which all England got a 
cloak; and without his cane, like which all England got 
a cane; without his snuff-box, like which all England 
got a snuff-box — he, the fop of the ages, particular about 
everything but his morals; and Aaron Burr, without 
the letters that down to old age he showed in pride, to 
prove his early wicked gallantries; and Absalom without 
his hair; and Marchioness Pompadour without her titles; 
and Mrs. Arnold, the belle of Wall street, when that 
was the center of fashion, without her fripperies of 
vesture. 

And in great haggardness they shall go away into 
eternal expatriation ; while among the queens of heaven- 
ly society will be found Yashti, who wore the modest 
veil before the palatial bacchanalians; and Hannah, who 
annually made a little coat for Samuel at the temple; and 
Grandmother Lois, the ancestress of Timothy, who imi- 
tated her virtue; and Mary, who gave Jesus Christ to 
the world; and many of you, the wives and mothers and 
sisters and daughters of the present Christian Church, 
who through great tribulation are entering into the 
kingdom of God. Christ announced who would make 
up the royal family of heaven when he said, " Whoso- 
ever doeth the will of God, the same is my brother, my 
sister, my mother." 



THE KESERVOIES SALTED. 



127 



CHAPTEK X. 

THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 

^ " And the men of the city- said unto Elisha, Behold, I pray thee, the 
situation of this city is pleasant, as my Lord seeth ; but the water is 
naught, and the ground barren And he said. Bring me a new cruse, 
and put salt therein. And they brought it to him. And he went 
forth unto the spring of the waters, and cast the salt in there, and said, 
Thus saith the Lord, I have healed these waters ; there shall not be 
from thence any more death or barren land. So the waters were 
healed unto this day." — 2 Kings ii : 19-22. 

It is difficult to estimate how much of the prosperity 
and health of a city are dependent upon good water. 
The day when, through well-laid pipes and from safe 
leservoir, an abundance of water, from Croton or Ridge- 
^vood, is brought into the city, is appropriately celebrated 
"with oration and pyrotechnic display. Thank God every 
day for clear, bright, beautiful, sparkling water, as it 
drops in the shower, or tosses up in the fountain, or 
rushes out at the hydrant. 

The city of Jericho, notwithstanding all its physical 
and commercial advantages, was lacking in this impor- 
tant element. There was enough water, but it was dis- 
eased, and the people were crying out by reason thereof. 
Elisha the prophet comes to the rescue. He says: " Get 
le a new cruse; fill it with salt and bring it to me." 
So the cruse of salt was brought to the prophet, and I 
see him walking out to the general reservoir, and he 
takes that salt and throws it into the reservoir, and lo! 
all the impurities depart, through a supernatural and 



128 



XI&HT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



divine influence, and the waters are good and fresh and 
clear, and all the people clap their hands and lift up 
their faces in their gladness. Water for Jericho — clear, 
bright, beautiful, God-given water! 

For several Sabbath mornings I have pointed out to 
you the fountains of municipal corruption, and this 
morning I propose to show you what are the means for 
the rectification of those fountains. There are four or 
five kinds of salt that have a cleansing tendency. So far 
as God may help me this morning, I shall bring a cruse 
of salt to tlie work, and empty it into the great reservoir 
of municipal crime, sin, shame, ignorance, and abomina- 
tion. 

In this work of cleansing our cities, I have first to re- 
mark that there is a vjorh for the hroom and the shovel 
that nothing else can do. There always has beeu an inti- 
mate connection between iniquity and dirt. The filthy 
parts of the great cities are always the most iniquitous 
parts. The gutters and the pavements of the Fourth 
"Ward, Xew York, illustrate and symbolize the character 
of the people in the Fourth Ward. 

The first thing that a bad man does when he is con- 
verted is thoroughly to wash himself. There were, this 
morning, on the way to the different churches, thousands 
of men in proper apparel who, before their conversion, 
were unfit in their Sabbath dress. When on the Sab- 
bath I see a man uncleanly in his dress, my suspicions 
in regard to his moral character are aroused, and they 
are always well founded. So as to allow no excuse for 
lack of ablution, God has cleft the continents with rivers 
and lakes, and has sunk five great oceans, and all the 
world ought to be clean. Away, then, with the dirt from 
our cities, not only because the physical health needs an 
ablution, but because all the great moral and religious 



THE KESEKVOIKS SALTEl?. 



129^ 



interests of the cities demand it as a positive necessity. 
A filthy city always has been and always will be a wicked 
city. 

Another corrective influence that we would bring to 
bear upon the evils of our great cities is a Chrisiiau 
j)rinting -press. The newspapers of any place are the= 
test of its morality or immorality. The newsboy who 
runs along the street with a roll of papers under his arm 
is a tremendous force that cannot be turned aside nor 
resisted, and at his every step the city is elevated or de- 
graded. This hungry, all-devouring American mind 
must have something to read, and upon editors and 
authors and book-publishers and parents and teachers 
rest the responsibility of what they shall read. Almost 
every man you meet has a book in his hand or a news- 
paper in his pocket. What book is it you have in your 
hand? What newspaper is it you have in yoar pocket ? 
Ministers may preach, reformers may plan, philan- 
thropists may toil for the elevation of the suffering and 
the criminal, but until all the newspapers of the land 
and all the booksellers of the land set themselves against 
an iniquitous literature — until then we will be fighting 
against fearful odds. Every time the cylinders of Har- 
per or Appleton or Ticknor or' Peterson or Lippincott 
turn, they make the earth quake. From them goes forth 
a thought like an angel of light to feed and bless the 
world, or like an angel of darkness to smite it with cor- 
ruption and sin and shame and death. May God by His 
omnipotent Spirit purify and elevate the American 
printing-press! 

I go on further and say that we must depend upon the 
school for a great deal of correcting influence. Com- 
munity can no more afford to have ignorant men in its 
midst than it can afford to have uncaged hyenas. Ignor- 
9 



130 



NiaHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



ance is the mother of hydras-headed crime. Thirty-one 
per cent, of all the criminals of New York State can 
neither read nor write. In tellectual darkness is generally 
the precursor of moral darkness. 1 know there are edu- 
cated outlaws — men w^ho, through their sharpness of in- 
tellect, are made more dangerous. They use their fine 
penmanship in signing other people's names, and their 
science in ingenious burglaries, and their fine manners 
in adroit libertinism. They go their round of sin with 
well-cut apparel, and dangling jewelry, and watches of 
eighteen karats, and kid gloves. They are refined, edu- 
cated, magnificent villains. But that is the exception- 
It is generally the case that the criminal classes are as 
ignorant as they are wicked. For the proof of what I 
say, go into the prisons and the penitentiaries, and look 
upon the men and women incarcerated. The dishonesty 
in the eye, the low passion in the lip, are not more con- 
spicuous than the ignorance in the forehead. The igno- 
rant classes are always the dangerous classes. Dema- 
gogues marshal them. They are helmless, and are driven 
before the gale. 

It is high time that all city and State authority, as well 
as the Federal Government, appreciated the awful sta- 
tistic that while years ago in this country there was set 
apart forty-eight millions of acres of land for school pur- 
poses, there are now in 'Hew England one hundred and 
ninety-one thousand people who can neither read nor 
write, and in the State of Pennsylvania two hundred and 
twenty-two thousand who can neither read nor write, 
and in the State of ITew York two hundred and forty- 
one thousand who can neither read nor write, while in 
the United States there are nearly six millions who can 
neither read nor write. A statistic enough to stagger 
and confound any man who loves his God and his country. 



THE RESERVOIRS SALTED. 



131 



Kow, in view of this fact, I am in favor of compulsory 
education. The Eleventh ward, in I^ew York, has five 
thousand children who are not in school. When parents 
are so bestial as to neglect this duty to the child, I say 
the law, with a strong hand, at the same time with a 
gentle hand, ought to lead these little ones into the light 
of intelligence and good morals. It was a beautiful tab- 
leau when in our city a few weeks ago, a swarthy police- 
man having picked up a lost child in the street, was 
found appeasing its cries by a stick of candy he had 
bought at the apple-stand. That was well done, and 
beautifully done. But, oh! these thousands of little ones 
through our streets, who are crying for the bread of 
knowledge and intelligence. Shall we not give it to them % 
The officers of the law ought to go down into the cellars, 
and up into the garrets, and bring out these benighted lit- 
tle ones, and put them under educational infiences ; after 
they have passed through the bath and under the comb, 
putting before them the spelling-book, and teaching them 
to read the Lord's Prayer and the sermon on the Mount: 
^'Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom 
of heaven." Our city ought to be father and mother 
both to these outcast little ones. As a recipe for the cure 
of much of the woe and want and crime of our city, I 
give the words which Thorwaldsen had chiseled on the 
open scroll in the hand of the statue of John Gutenberg, 
the inventor of the art of printing: " Let there be light!" 

Still further: reforinatory societies are an important 
element in the reotlfioation of the public fountains. 
Without calling any of them by name, I refer more 
especially to those which recognize the physical as well 
as the moral woes of the world. There was pathos and 
a great deal of common sense in what the poor woman 
said to Dr. Guthrie when he was telling her what a very 



132 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



good woman she ought to be. " Oh," she said, "if you 
were as hungry and cold as I am, you could think of 
nothing else." I believe the great want of our city is 
the Grospel and something to eat! Faith and repentance 
are of infinite importance; but they cannot satisfy an 
empty stomach! You have to go forth in this work with 
the bread of eternal life in your right hand, and the bread 
of this life in your left hand, and then you can touch 
them, imitating the Lord Jesus Christ, who first broke 
the bread and fed the multitude in the wilderness, and 
then began to preach, recognizing the fact that while 
people are hungry they will not listen, and they will not 
repent. We want more common sense in the distribu- 
tion of our charities; fewer magnificent theories, and 
more hard work. In the last war, a few hours after the 
battle of Antietam, I had a friend who was moving over 
the field, and who saw a good Christian man distributing 
tracts. My friend said to him: This is no time to dis- 
tribute tracts. There are three thousand men around 
here who are bleeding to death, who have not had ban- 
dages put on. Take care of their bodies, then give them 
tracts." That was well said. Look after the woes of 
the body, and then you will have some success in look- 
ing after the woes of the soul. 

Still further: the great remedial influence is the Gos- 
pel of Christ, Take that down through the lanes of 
suffering. Take that down amid the hovels of sin. Take 
that up amid the mansions and palaces of your city. That 
is the salt that can cure all the poisoned fountains of pub- 
lic iniquity. Do you know that in this cluster of three 
cities, York, Jersey City, and Brooklyn, there are 
a great multitude of homeless children ? You see I speak 
more in regard to the youth and the children of the 
country, because old villains are seldom reformed, and 



thp: reservoirs salted. 



133 



therefore I talk more about the little ones. They sleep 
under the stoops, in the burned-out safe, in the wagons 
in the streets, on the barges, wherever thej can get a 
board to cover them. And in the summer they sleep all 
night long in the parks. Their destitution is well set 
forth by an incident. A city missionary asked one of 
them; "Where is your home?" Said he: "1 don't have 
no home, sir." "Well, where are your father and 
mother?" "They are dead, sir." "Did you ever hear 
of Jesus Christ?" "No, I don't think I ever heard of 
him." "Did you ever hear of God. Yes, I've heard of 
God. Some of the poor people think it kind of lucky 
at night to say something over about that before they 
go to sleep. Yes, sir, I've heard of him." Think of a 
conversation like that in a Christian city. 

How many are waiting for you to come out in the 
spirit of the Lord Jesus Christ and rescue them from 
the wretchedness here ! A man was trying to talk with 
a group of these outcasts,, and read the Bible, and trying 
to confort them, and he said : "My dear boys, when your 
father and your mother forsake you, who will take you 
up?" They shouted "The perlice, sir; the perlice? " Oh 
that the Church of God had arras long enough and hearts 
warm enough to take them up. How many of them 
there are! As I was thinking of the subject this morning, 
it seemed to me as though there was a great brink, and 
that these little ones with cut and torn feet were coming 
on toward it. And here is a group of orphans. O fathers 
and mothers, what do you think of these fatherless and 
motherless little ones ? ISTo hand at home to take care 
of their apparel, no heart to pity them. Said one little 
one, when the mother died: "Who will take care of my 
clothes now ? " The little ones are thrown out in this 
great, cold world. They are shivering on the brink like 



134 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



lambs on the verge of a precipice. Does not your blood 
run cold as they go over it ? 

And here is another group that come on toward the 
precipice. They are the children of besotted parents. 
They are worse off than orphans. Look at that pale 
cheek: woe bleached it. Look at that gash across the 
forehead ; the father struck it. Hear that heart-piercing 
cry: a drunken mother's blasphemy compelled it. And we 
come out and we say: "O ye suffering, peeled and 
blistered ones, we come to help you." " Too latel" cry 
thousands of voices. " The path we travel is steep down, 
and we can't stop. Too late!" and we catch our breath 
and we make a terrific outcry. " Too late!"| is echoed 
from the garret to the cellar, from the gin-shop and 
from the brothel. " Too late!" It is too late, and they 
go over. 

Here is another group, an army of neglected children. 
They come on toward the brink, and every time they 
step ten thousand hearts break. The ground is red with 
the blood of their feet. The air is heavy with their 
groans. Their ranks are being filled up from all the 
houses of iniquity and shame. Skeleton Despair pushes 
them on toward the brink. The death-knell has already 
begun to toll, and the angels of Grod hover like birds 
over the plunge of a cataract. While these children 
are on the brink they halt, and throw out their hands, 
and cry: "Help! help!" O church of God, will you 
help? Men and women bought by the blood of the Son 
of God, will you help? while Christ cries from the 
heavens: "Save them from going down; I am the 
ransom." 

I stopped the other day on the street and just looked 
at the face of one of those little ones. Have you ever 
examined the faces of the neglected children of the 



THE BESEBVOIRS SALTED. 



135 



poor? Other children have gladness in their faces. 
When a group of them rush across the road, it seems as 
though a spring gust had unloosened an orchard of apple 
blossoms. But these children of the poor. There is but 
little ring in their laughter, and it stops quick, as though 
some bitter memory tripped it. They have an old walk. 
They do not skip or run up on the lumber just for the 
pleasure of leaping down. They never bathed in the 
mountain stream. They never waded in the brook for 
pebbles. They never chased the butterfly across the 
lawn, putting their hat right down where it was. 
Childhood has been dashed out of them. Want waved 
its wizard wand above the manger of their birth, and 
withered leaves are lying where God intended a budding 
giant of battle. Once in a while one of these children 
gets out. Here is one, for instance. At ten years of age 
he is sent out by his parents, who say to him; "Here 
is a basket — now go off and beg and steal." The boy 
says: " I can't steal."' ,They kick him into a corner. 
That night he puts his swollen head into the straw; but 
a voice comes from heaven, saying, " Courage, poor boy, 
courage." Covering up his head from the bestiality, 
and stopping his ears from the cursing, he gets on up 
better and better. He washes his face clean at the public 
hydrant. With a few pennies got at running errands, 
he gets a better coat. Rough men, knowing that he 
comes from the Five Points, say: " Back with you, you 
little villain, to the place where you came from." But 
that night the boy says: " Grod help me, I can't go 
back;" and quicker than ever mother flew at the cry of 
a child's pain, the Lord responds from the heavens, 
" Courage, poor boy, courage." His bright face gets 
him a position. After a while he is second clerk. Years 
pass on, and he is first clerk. Years pass on. The 



136 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



glory of young manhood is on liim. He comes into the 
firm. He goes on from one business success to another. 
He has achieved great fortune. He is the friend of the 
church of God, the friend of all good institutions, and 
one day he stands talking to the Board of Trade or to 
the Chamber of Commerce. People say: " Do you know 
who that is? Why, that is a merchant prince, and he 
was born in the Five Points. " But God says in regard to 
him something better than that: "These are they 
which came out of great tribulation, and had their 
robes washed and made white in the blood of the 
Lamb." Oh, for some one to write the history of boy 
heroes and girl heroines who have triumphed over want 
and starvation and filth and rags. Yea, the record has 
already been made — made by the hand of God; and 
when these shall come at last with songs and rejoicing, 
it will take a very broad banner to hold the names of all 
the battle-fields on which they got the victory. 

Some years ago, a roughly-clad, ragged boy came into 
my brother's office in Kew York, and said: " Mr. Tal- 
mage, lend me five dollars." My brother said: " Who 
are you ?" The boy replied : " I am nobody. Lend me 
five dollars." ''What do you want to do with five 
dollars?" " Well," the boy replied, " my mother is sick 
and poor, and I want to go into the newspaper business, 
and I shall get a home for her, and I will pay you back." 
My brother gave him the five dollars, of course never 
expecting to see it again; but he said: " When will you 
pay it?" The boy said: "I will pay it in six months, 
sir." Time went by, and one day a lad came into ray 
brother's office, and said: ''There's your five dollars." 
" What do you mean? What five dollars?" inquired my 
brother. " Don't you remember that a boy came in here 
six months a^o and wanted to borrow five dollars to so 



THE RESERVOIKS SALTED. 



13T 



into the newspaper business?" "Oh, yes, I remember. 
Are you the lad?" "Yes," he replied. "I have got 
along nicely. I have got a nice home for my mother 
(she is sick yet), and I am as well clothed as you are, and 
there's your five dollars." Oh, was he not worth saving? 
Why, that lad is worth fifty such boys as I have some- 
times seen moving in elegant circles, never put to any 
use for Grod or man. "Worth saving! I go farther than 
that, and tell you they are not only worth saving, but 
they are being saved. In one reform school, through 
which two thousand of these little ones passed, one 
thousand nine hundred and ninety-five turned out well. 
In other words, only five of the two thousand turned out 
badly. There are thousands of them who, through Chris- 
tian societies, have been transplanted to beautiful homes 
all over this land, and there are many who, through the 
rich grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, have already won 
the crown. A little girl was found in the streets of Bal- 
timore and taken into one of the reform societies, and 
they said to her, " What is your name?" She said, " My 
name is Mary." " What is your other name?" She said, 

I don't know." So they took her into the reform 
society, and as they did not know her last name they 
always called her "Mary Lost," since she had been 
picked up out of the street. But she grew on, and after 
a while the Holy Spirit came to her heart, and she be- 
came a Christian child, and she changed her name ; and 
when anybody asked her what her name was, she said, 
" It used to be Mary Lost; but now, since I have become 
a Christian, it is Mary Found." 

For this vast multitude, are we willing to go forth 
from this morning's service and see what we can do, 
employing all the agencies I have spoken of for the recti- 
fication of the poisoned fountains ? We live in a beautiful 



138 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



city. The lines have fallen to us in pleasant places, and 
we have a goodly heritage; and any man who does not 
like a residence in Brooklyn, must be a most uncom- 
fortable and unreasonable man. But, my friends, the 
material prosperity of a city is not its chief glory. There 
may be fine houses and beautiful streets, and that all be 
the garniture of a sepulcher. Some of the most pros- 
perous cities of the world have gone down, not one stone 
left upon another. But a city may be in ruins long be- 
fore a tower has fallen, or a column has crumbled, or a 
tomb has been defaced. When in a city the churches of 
God are full of cold formalities and inanimate religion ; 
when the houses of commerce are the abode of fraud and 
unholy traffic; when the streets are filled with crime un- 
arrested and sin unenlightened and helplessness unpitied 
— that city is in ruins, though every church were a St. 
Peter's, and every moneyed institution were a Bank of 
England, and every library were a British Museum, and 
every house had a porch like that of E-heims and a roof 
like that of Amiens and a tower like that of Antwerp, 
and traceried windows like those of Freiburg. 

My brethren, our pulses beat rapidly the time away, 
and soon we will be gone; and what we have to do for 
the city in which we live we must do right speedily, or 
never do it at all. In that day, when those who have 
wrapped themselves in luxuries and despised the poor, 
shall come to shame and everlasting contempt, I hope it 
may be said of you and me that we gave bread to the 
hungry, and wiped away the tear of the orphan, and upon 
the wanderer of the street we opened the brightness and 
benediction of a Christian home; and then, through our 
instrumentality, it shall be known on earth and in heaven, 
that Mary Lost became Mary Found ! 



THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 



139 



CHAPTEK XI. 

THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 

"And the ravens brought bread and flesh in the morning, and bread 
and flesh in the evening." — 1 Kings xvii: 6. 

The ornithology of the Bible is a very interesting 
study. The stork which knoweth her appointed time. 
The common sparrows teaching the lesson of God's 
providence. The ostriches of the desert, by careless 
incubation illustrating the recklessness of parents who 
do not take enough pains with their children. The 
eagle symbolizing riches which take wings and fly away. 
The pelican, emblemizing solitude. The bat, a flake of 
the darkness. The night hawk,' the ossifrage, the cuckoo, 
the lapwing, the osprey, by the command of God in 
Leviticus, flung out of the world's bill of fare. I would 
like to have been with Audubon as he went through the 
woods, with gun and pencil bringing down and sketch- 
ing the fowls of heaven, his unfolded portfolio thrilling 
all Christendom. What wonderful creatures of God the 
birds are! Some of them this morning, like the songs 
of heaven let loose, bursting through the gates of heaven. 
Consider their feathers, which are clothing and convey- 
ance at the same time; the nine vertebr86 of the neck, 
the three eyelids to each eye, the third eyelid an extra 
curtain for graduating the light of the sun. Some of 
these birds scavengers and some of them orchestra. 
Thank God for quail's whistle, and lark's carol, and the 
twitter of the wren, called by the ancients the king of 



140 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



birds, because when the fowls of heaven went into a con- 
test as to who could flj the highest, and the eagle swung 
nearest the sun, a wren on the back of the eagle, after 
the eagle was exhausted, sprang up much higher, and so 
was called by the ancients the king of birds. Consider 
those of them that have golden crowns and crests, show- 
ing them to be feathered iniperials. And listen to the 
humming-bird's serenade in the ear of the honeysuckle. 
Look at the belted kingfisher, striking like a dart from 
sky to water. Listen to the voice of the owl, giving the 
key-note to all croakers. And behold the condor, among 
the Andes, battling with the reindeer. I do not know 
whether an aquarium or aviary is the best altar from 
which to worship God. 

There is an incident in my text that bafiles all the 
ornithological wonders of the world. The grain crop 
had been cut off. Famine was in the land. In a cave 
by the brook Cherith sat a minister of God, Elijah, 
waiting for something to eat. Why did he not go to 
the neighbors? There were no neighbors, it was a wil- 
derness. Why did he not pick some of the berries? 
There were none. If there had been, they would have 
been dried up. Seated, one morning at the mouth of his 
cave, the prophet looks into the dry and pitiless heavens, 
and he sees a flock of birds approaching. Oh! if they 
were only partridges, or if he only had an arrow with 
which to bring them down. But as they come nearer 
he finds they are not comestible, but unclean, and the 
eating of them would be spiritual death. The strength 
of their beak, the length of their wings, the blackness of 
their color, their loud, harsh "cruck! cruck!" prove 
them to be ravens. They whirr around about the 
prophet's head, and then they come on fluttering wing 
and pause on the level of his lips, and one of the ravens 



THE BATTLE FOB BREAD. 



Ul 



brings bread, and another raven brings meat, and after 
thej have discharged their tiny cargo they wheel past, 
and others come, until after a while the prophet has 
enough, and these black servants of the wilderness table 
are gone. For six months, and some say a whole year, 
morning and evening, the breakfast and supper bell 
sounded as these ravens rang out on the air their "cruck! 
cruck!" Guess where they got the food from. The old 
Rabbins say they got it from the kitchen of King Ahab. 
Others say that the ravens got the food from pious Oba- 
diah, who was in the habit of feeding the persecuted. 
Some say that the ravens brought the food to their 
young in the trees, and that Elijah had only to climb up 
and get it. Some say that the whole story is improb- 
able; for these were carnivorous birds, and the food they 
carried was the torn flesh of living beasts, and that cere- 
monially unclean, or it was carrion, and it would not 
have been fit for the prophet. Some say they were not 
ravens at all, but that the word translated " ravens " in 
my text ought to have been translated "Arabs; " so it 
would have read : " The Arabs brought bread and flesh 
in the morning, and bread and flesh in the evening." 
Anything but admit the Bible to be true. Hew away at 
this miracle until all the miracle is gone. Go on with 
the depleting process; but know, my brother, that you 
are robbing only one man — and that is yourself — of one 
of the most comforting, beautiful, pathetic, and tri- 
umphant lessons in all the ages. I can tell you who 
these purveyors were: they were ravens. I can tell you 
who freighted- them with provisions. God. I can tell 
you who launched them. God. I can tell you who 
taught them which way to fly. God. I can tell you 
who told them at what cave to swoop. God. I can tell 
you who introduced raven to prophet, and prophet to 



142 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



raven. God. There is one passage I will whisper in 
yonr ear, for I would not want to utter it aloud, lest 
some one should drop down under its power: "If anj 
man shall take away from the words of the prophesy of 
this book, God shall take away his part out of the book 
of life and out of the holy city." While, then, this 
morning we watch the ravens feeding Elijah, let the 
swift dove of God's Spirit sweep down the sky with 
Divine food, and on outspread wing pause at the lip of 
every soul hungering for comfort. 

If I should ask you where is the seat of war to-day, 
you would say on the Danube. No. That is compara- 
tively a small conflict, even if all Europe should plunge 
into it. The great conflict to-day is on the Thames, on 
the Hudson, on the Mississippi, on the Khine, on the 
I^ile, on the Ganges, on the Hoang Ho. It is a battle 
that has been going on for six thousand years. The 
troops engaged in it are twelve hundred millions, and 
those who have fallen are vaster in numbers than those 
who march. It is a battle for bread. Sentimentalists 
sit in a cushioned chair, in their pictured study, with 
their slippered feet on a damask ottoman, and say that 
this world is a great scene of avarice and greed. It does 
not seem so to me. If it were not for the absolute 
necessities of the cases, nine-tenths of the stores, facto- 
ries, shops, banking-houses, of the land would be closed 
to-morrow. Who is that man delving in the Black 
Hills? or toiling in a New England factory? or going 
through a roll of bills in the bank? or measuring a fab- 
ric on the counter? He is a champion sent forth in 
behalf of some home circle that has to be cared for — in 
behalf of some church of God that has to be supported — 
in behalf of some asylum of mercy that has to be sus- 
tained. Who is that woman bending over the sewing 



THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 



143 



machine ? or carrying the bundle ? or sweeping the room ? 
or mending the garment? or sweltering at the wash-tub? 
That is Deborah, one of the Lord's heroines, battling 
against Amalekitish want, which comes down with iron 
chariot to crush her and hers. The great question with 
the vast majority of people to-day is not whether Presi- 
dent Hayes treated South Carolina and Louisiana as he 
ought — not whether the Turkish Sultan or the Russian 
Czar ought to be helped in this conflict — the great ques- 
tion with the vast majority of people is: "How shall I 
support my family? How shall I meet my notes? How 
shall I pay my rent? How shall I give food, clothing, 
and education to those who are dependent upon me?" 
Oh! if God would help me to-day to assist you in the 
solution of that problem, the happiest man in this house 
would be your preacher. I have gone out on a cold 
morning with expert sportsmen to hunt for pigeons ; I 
have gone out on the meadows to hunt for quail; I have 
gone out on the marsh to hunt for rfeed birds; but this 
morning I am out for ravens. 

Notice, in the first place, in the story of ray text, that 
these winged caterers came to Elijah directly from God. 
" I have commanded the ravens that they feed thee," we 
find God saying in an adjoining passage. They did not 
come out of some other cave. They did not just happen 
to alight there. God freighted them, God launched 
them, and God told them by what cave to swoop. That 
is the same God that is going to supply you. He is 
your Father. You would have to make an elaborate 
calculation before you could tell me how many pounds 
of food and how many yards of clothing would be neces- 
sary for you and your family; but God knows without 
any calculation. You have a plate at his table, and you 
are going to be waited on, unless you act like a naughty 



lU 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



child, and kick, and scramble, and pound saucily the 
plate, and try to upset things. God has a vast family, 
and everything is methodized, and you are going to be 
served, if you will only wait your turn. God has already 
ordered all the suits of clothes you will ever need down 
to the last suit in which you shall be laid out. God has 
already ordered all the food you will ever eat down to 
the last crumb that will be put in your mouth in the 
dying sacrament. It may not be just the kind of food 
or apparel we would prefer. The sensible parent depends 
on his own judgment as to what ought to be the apparel 
and the food of the minor in the family. The child 
would say: "Give me sugars and confections." **0h! 
no," says the parent. " You must have something 
plainer first." The child would say: "Oh! give me 
these great blotches of color in the garment." " IS'o," 
says the parent; "that wouldn't be suitable." Now, 
God is our Father, and we are minors, and he is going 
to clothe us and feed us, although he may not always 
yield to our infantile wish for sweets and glitter. These 
ravens of the text did not bring pomegranates from the 
glittering platter of King Ahab. They brought bread 
and meat. God had all the heavens and the earth before 
him and under him, and yet he sends this plain food 
because it was best for Elijah to have it! Oh! be strong, 
my hearer, in the fact that the same God is going to 
supply you. It is never "hard times " with him. His 
ships never break on the rocks. His banks never fail. 
He has the supply for you, and he has the means for 
sending it. He has not only the cargo, but the ship. If 
it were necessary he would swing out from the heavens 
a flock of ravens reaching from his gate to yours, until 
the food would be flung down the sky from beak to beak 
and from talon to talon. 



I 



THE BATTLE FOR BREAD. 



145 



Notice, again, in this story of the text, that the ravens 
did not allow Elijah to hoard up a surplus. They did 
not bring enough on Monday to last all the week. They 
did not bring enough one morning to last until the next 
morning. They came twice a day, and brought just 
enough for one time. You know as well as I that the 
great fret of the world is that we want a surplus — we 
want the ravens to bring enough for fifty years. You 
have more confidence in the Long Island Bank than you 
have in the royal bank of heaven. You say: "All that 
is very poetic, but you may have the black ravens — give 
me the gold eagles." We had better be content with 
just enough. If, in the morning, your family eat up all 
the food there is in the house, do not sit down, and cry, 
and say: " I don't know where the next meal is coming 
from." About five, or six, or seven o'clock in the even- 
ing just look up, and you will see two black spots on the 
sky, and you will hear the flapping of wings, and, 
instead of Edgar A. Poe's insane raven " alighting on 
the chamber-door, only this, and nothing more," you 
will find Elijah's two ravens, or the two ravens of the 
Lord, the one bringing bread and the other bringing 
meat — plumed butcher and baker. 

God is infinite in resource. When the city of Rochelle 
was besieged, and the inhabitants were dying of the fam- 
ine, the tides washed up on the beach as never before, 
and as never since, enough shell-fish to feed the whole 
city. God is good. There is no mistake about that. 
History tells us that, in 1555, in England, there was a 
great drought. The crops failed, but in Essex, on the 
rocks, in a place where they had neither sown nor cul- 
tured, a great crop of peas grew, until they filled a hun- 
dred measures; and there were blossoming vines enough 
promising as much more. But why go so far ? I can 
10 



146 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



give jou a family incident. I will tell you a secret that 
has never been told. Some generations back there was 
a great drought in Connecticut, 'New England. The 
water disappeared from the hills and the farmers living 
on the hills drove their- cattle down toward the valleys, 
and had them supplied at the wells and fountains of the 
neighbors. But these after awhile began to fail, and the 
neighbors said to Mr. Birdseye, of whom I shall speak: 
" You must not send your flocks and herds down here 
any more; our wells are giving out." Mr. Birdseye, the 
old Christian man, gathered his family at the altar, and 
with his family he gathered the slaves of the household — 
for bondage was then in vogue in Connecticut — and on 
their knees before God they cried for water; and the 
family story is, that there was weeping and great sobbing 
at that altar, that the family might not perish for lack of 
water, and that the herds and flocks might not perish. 
The family rose from the altar. Mr. Birdseye, the old 
man, took his staff and walked out over the hills, and in 
a place-where he had been scores of times without notic- 
ing anything particular, he saw the ground was very 
dark, and he took his staff, and turned up the ground, 
and the water started ; and he beckoned to his servants 
and they came, and they brought pails and buckets until 
all the family, and all the flocks and the herds, were 
cared for, and then they made troughs reaching from 
that place down to the house and barn, and the water 
flowed, and it is a living fountain to-day! Now, I call 
that old grandfather, Elijah, and I call that brook that 
began to roll then, and is rolling still, the brook Cherith; 
and the lesson to me, and to all who hear it, is, when 
you are in great stress of circumstances, pray and dig, 
dig and pray, and pray and dig. How does that passage 
go? — ''The mountains shall depart, and the hills be 



THE BATTLE FOE BREAD. 



147 



removed, but my loving-kindness shall not fail." If 
your merchandise, if your mechanism, fail, look out for 
ravens. If you have, in your despondency, put God on 
trial, and condemned him as guilty of cruelty, I move, 
this morning for a new trial. If the biography of your 
life is ever written, I will tell you what the first chapter, 
and the middle chapter, and the last chapter will be 
about, if it is written accurately. The first about mercy, 
the middle chapter about mercy, the last chapter about 
mercy. The mercy that hovered over your cradle. The 
mercy that will hover over your grave. The mercy that 
will cover all between. 

Again, this story of the text impresses me that relief 
came to this prophet with the most unexpected, and with 
seemingly impossible, conveyance. If it had been a rob- 
in red-breast, or a musical meadow-lark, or a meek turtle- 
dove, or a sublime albatross that had brought the food 
to Elijah, it would not have been so surprising. But no. 
It was a bird so fierce and inauspicate that we have fash- 
ioned one of our most forceful and repulsive words out 
of it — ravenous. That bird has a passion for picking out 
the eyes of men and animals. It loves to maul the sick 
and the dying. It swallows, with vulturous guggle, 
everything it can put its beak on ; and yet all the food 
Elijah gets for six months or a year is from the ravens. 
So your supply is going to come from an unexpected 
source. You think some great-hearted, generous man 
will come along and give you his name on the back of 
your note, or he will go security for you in some great 
enterprise. 'No, he will not. God will open the heart 
of some Shylock toward you. Your relief will come 
from the most unexpected quarter. The Providence 
that seemed ominous will be to you more than that 
which seemed auspicious. It will not be a chaffinch with 



148 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



breast and wing dashed with white, and brown, and 
chestnut: it will be a black raven. 

Here is where we all make our mistake, and that is in 
regard to the color of Grod's providence. A white provi- 
dence comes to us, and we say: "O! it is mercy." Then 
a black providence comes toward us, and we say: *'0I 
that is disaster." The white providence comes to you, 
and you have great business success, and you have fifty 
thousand dollars, and you get proud, and you get inde- 
pendent of God, and you begin to feel that the prayer 
"Give me this day my daily bread " is inappropriate for 
you, for you have made provision for a hundred years. 
Then a black providence comes, and it sweeps everything 
away, and then you begin to pray, and you begin to feel 
your dependence, and begin to be humble before God, 
and you cry out for treasures in heaven. The black 
providence brought you salvation. The white provi- 
dence brought you ruin. That which seemed to be 
harsh, and fierce, and dissonant, was your greatest mer- 
cy. It was a raven. 

There was a child born in your house. All your 
friends congratulated you. The other children of the 
family and of the neighborhood stood amazed looking at 
the new-comer, and asked a great many questions, gene- 
alogical and chronological. You said — and you said 
truthfully — that a white angel flew through the room 
and left the little one there. That little one stood with 
its two feet in the very center of your sanctuary of afiec- 
tion, and with its two hands it took hold of the altar 
of your soul. But one day there came one of the three 
scourges of children — scarlet fever, or croup, or diph- 
theria — and all that bright scene vanished. The chatter- 
ing, the strange questions, the pulling at the dresses as 
you crossed the floor — all ceased. As the great friend of 



THE BATTLE FOK BREAD. 



149 



children stooped down and leaned toward that cradle, 
and took the little one in His arms, and walked away 
with it into the bower of eternal summer, your eye be- 
gan to follow Him, and you followed the treasure He car- 
ried, and you have been following them ever since ; and, 
instead of thinking of heaven only once a week, as form- 
erly, you are thinking of it all the time, and you are 
more pure and tender-hearted than you used to be, and 
you are patiently waiting for the day-break. It is not 
self-righteousness in you to acknowledge that you are a 
better man than you used to be — you are a better woman 
than you used to be. What was it that brought you the 
sanctifying blessing? O! it was the dark shadow on the 
nursery; it was the dark shadow on the short grave; it 
was the dark shadow on your broken heart; it was the 
brooding of a great black trouble; it was a raven — it was 
a raven. Dear Lord, teach this people that white provi- 
dences do not always mean advancement, and that black 
providences do not always mean retrogression. 

Children of God, get up out of your despondency. 
The Lord never had so many ravens as he has this morn- 
ing. Fling your fret and worry to the winds. Some- 
times, under the vexations of life, you feel like my little 
girl of four years last week, who said, under some child- 
ish vexations: ^*0h, I wish I could go to heaven, and see 
God, and pick flowers!" He will let you go when the 
right time comes to pick flowers. Until then, whatever 
you want, pray for. I suppose Elijah prayed pretty much 
all the time. Tremendous work behind him. Tremend- 
ous work before him. God has no spare ravens for idlers, 
or for people who are prayerless. I put it in the boldest 
shape possible, and I am willing to risk my eternity on 
it: ask God in the right way for what you want, and you 
shall have it, if it is best for you. Mrs. Jane Pithey, of 



150 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



Chicago, a well-known Christian woman, was left by her 
husband a widow with one half dollar and a cottage. She 
was palsied, and had a mother, ninety years of age, to sup- 
port. The widowed soul every day asked God for all that 
was needed in the household, and the servant even was 
astonished at the precision with which God answered the 
prayers of that woman item by item, item by item. One 
day, rising from the family altar, the servant said: "You 
have not asked for coal, and. the coal is out." Then they 
stood and prayed for the coal. One hour after that, the 
servant threw open the door and said: "The coal has 
come." A generous man, whose name I could give you, 
had sent — as never before and never since — a supply of 
coal. You cannot understand it. I do. Kavens! Ravens! 

My friend, you have a right to argue from precedent 
that God is going to take care of you. Has he not done 
it two or three times every day? That is most marvel- 
ous. I look back and I wonder that God has given me 
food three times a day regularly all my life-time, never 
missing but once, and then I was lost in the mountains; 
but that very morning and that very night I met the 
ravens. 

O! the Lord is so good that I wish all this people 
would trust Him with the two lives — the life you are now 
living and that which every tick of the watch and every 
stroke of the clock informs you is approaching. Bread 
for your immortal soul comes to-day. See! They alight 
on the platform. They alight on the backs of all the 
pews. They swing among the arches. Ravens! Ravens! 
" Blessed are they that hunger after righteousness, for 
they shall be filled." To all the sinning, and the sor- 
rowing, and the tempted deliverance comes this hour. 
Look down, and you see nothing but spiritual deformi- 
ties. Look back, and you see nothing but wasted oppor- 



THE BATTLE FOE BREAD. 



151 



tunity. Cast your eye forward, and you have a fearful 
looking-for of judgment and fiery indignation, which 
shall devour the adversary. But look up, and you behold 
the whipped shoulders of an interceding Christ, and the 
face of a pardoning God, and the irradiation of an open- 
ing heaven. I hear the whir of their wings. Do you 
not feel the rush of the air on your cheek? Ravens! 
Ravens! 

There is only one question I want to ask: how many 
of this audience are willing to trust God for the supply 
of their bodies, and trust the Lord Jesus Christ for the 
redemption of their immortal souls? Amid the clatter 
of the hoofs and the clang of the wheels of the judg- 
ment chariot, the whole matter will be demonstrated. 



162 



NIGMT SIDES OF CITY LIFE, 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE HORNET'S MISSION. 
"And the Lord will send the hornet." — Dent, vii : 30. 

It seems as if the insect world were determined to 
war against the human race. It is attacking the grai^n- 
fields and the orchards and the vineyards. The Colora- 
do beetle, the Nebraska grasshopper, the New Jersey lo- 
cust, the universal potato destroyer, seem to carry on the 
work which was begun ages ago when the insects buzzed 
out of Noah's ark as the door was opened. 

In my text the hornet flies out on its mission. It is a 
species of wasp, swift in its motion and violent in its 
sting. Its touch is torture to man or beast. We have 
all seen the cattle run bellowing from the cut of its lan- 
cet. In boyhood we used to stand cautiously looking at 
the globular nest hung from the tree branch, and while 
we were looking at the wonderful pasteboard covering 
we were struck with something that sent us shrieking 
away. The hornet goes in swarms. It has captains 
over hundreds, and twenty of them attacking one man 
will produce certain death. The Persians attempted to 
conquer a Christian city, but the elephants and the beasts 
on which the Persians rode were assaulted by the hornet, 
so that the whole army was broken up and the besieged 
city was rescued. This burning and noxious insect stung 
out the Hittites and the Canaanites from their country. 
What the gleaming sword and chariot of war could not 



THE hornet's mission. 



153 



accomplish was done by the puncture of an insect. The 
Lord sent the hornet. 

My friends, when we are assaulted by behemoths of 
trouble — great behemoths of trouble — we become chival- 
ric, and we assault them; we get on the high-mettled 
steed of our courage, and we make a cavalry charge at 
them, and, if God be with us, we come out stronger and 
better than when we went in. But, alas! for these in- 
sectile annoyances of life — these foes too small to shoot— 
these things without any avoirdupois weight — the gnats, 
and the midges, and the flies, and the wasps, and the 
hornets. In other words, it is the small stinging annoy- 
ances of our life which drive us out and use us up. In- 
to the best conditioned life, for some grand and glorious 
purpose, God sends the hornet. 

I remark in the first place that these small stinging 
annoyances may come in the shape of a sensitive nerv- 
ous organization. People who are prostrated under 
typhoid fevers or with broken bones get plenty of 
sympathy, but who pities anybody that is nervous? 
The doctors say, and the family says, and everybody says. 

Oh! she 's only a little nervous; that 's all." The sound 
of a heavy foot, the harsh clearing of a throat, a discord 
in music, a want of harmony between the shawl and the 
glove on the same person, a curt answer, a passing slight, 
the wind from the east, any one of ten thousand annoy- 
ances, opens the door for the hornet. The fact is, that 
the vast majority of the people in this country are over- 
worked, and their nerves are the first to give up. A 
great multitude are under the strain of Leyden, who, 
when he was told by his physician that if he did not stop 
working while he was in such poor physical health he 
would die, responded, ^' Doctor, whether I live or die the 
wheel must keep going around." These persons of whom 



154 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



I speak liave a bleeding sensitiveness. The flies love to 
light on anything raw, and these people are like the 
Canaanites spoken of in the text or in the con text — they 
have a very thin covering and are vulnerable at all 
points. "And the Lord sent the hornet." 

Again, these small insect annoyances may come to us 
in the shape of friends and acquaintances who are always 
saying disagreeable things. There are some people you 
cannot be with for half an hour but you feel cheered and 
comforted. Then there are other people you cannot be 
with for five minutes before you feel miserable. They 
do not mean to disturb you, but they sting you to the 
bone. They gather up all the yarn which the gossips 
spin, -and peddle it. They gather up all the adverse crit- 
icisms about your person, about your business, about 
your home, about your church, and they make your ear 
the funnel into which they pour it. They laugh heartily 
when they tell you, as though it were a good joke, and 
you laugh too — outside. These people are brought to 
our attention in the Bible, in the Book of Kuth: ITaomi 
went forth beautiful and with the finest of worldly pros- 
pects into another land, but after awhile she came back 
widowed, and sick, and poor. What did her friends do 
when she came back to the city? They all went out, 
and, instead of giving her common-sense consolation, 
what did they do ? Read the book of E-uth and find out. 
They threw up their hands and said, ^'Is this JSTaomi?" 
as much as to say " How very bad you look! " When I 
entered the ministry I looked very pale for years, and 
every year, for four or five years, a hundred times a year, 
I was asked if I was not in a consumption! And pass- 
ing through the room I would sometimes hear people 
sigh and say, "A-ah! not long for this world!" I resolved 
in those times that I never, in any conversation, would 



THE hornet's mission. 



155 



say anything depressing, and by the help of God I have 
kept the resolution. These people of whom I speak reap 
and bind in the great harvest-field of discouragement. 
Some days you greet them with a hilarious "Good 
morning," and they come buzzing at you with some de- 
pressing information. "The Lord sent the hornet.-' It 
is astonishing how some people prefer to write and to 
say disagreeable things. That was the case when four 
or five years ago Henry M. Stanley returned after his 
magnificent exploit of finding Doctor David Livingstone, 
and when Mr. Stanley stood before the savans of Europe, 
and many of the small critics of the day, under pretence 
of getting geographical information, put to him most in- 
solent questions, he folded his arms and refused to an- 
swer. At the very time when you would suppose all de- 
cent men would have applauded the heroism of the man, 
there were those to hiss. ''The Lord sent the hornet." 
And now at this time, when that man sits down on the 
western coast of Africa, sick and worn perhaps in the 
grandest achievement of the age in the way of geograph- 
ical discovery, there are small critics all over the world to 
buzz and buzz, and caricature and deride him, and after a 
while he will get the London papers, and, as he opens them, 
out will fly the hornet. "When I see that there are so 
many people in the world who like to say disagreeable 
things, and write disagreeable things, I come almost in 
my weaker moments to believe what a man said to me in 
Philadelphia one Monday morning. I went to get the 
horse that was at the livery, and the hostler, a plain man, 
said to me: "Mr. Talmage, I saw that you preached to 
the young men yesterday." I said, ''Yes." He said, 
"]N"o use, no use; man's a failure." 

The small insect annoyances of life sometimes come in 
the shape of a local physical trouble, which does not 



156 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



amount to a positive prostration, but whicli bothers you 
when you want to feel the best. Perhaps it is a sick 
headache which has been the plague of your life, and 
you appoint some occasion of mirth, or sociality, or use- 
fulness, and when the clock strikes the hour you cannot 
make your appearance. Perhaps the trouble is between 
the ear and the forehead, in the shape of a neuralgic 
twinge. ]N^obody can see it or sympathize with you; but 
just at the time when 3^ou want your intellect clearest, 
and your disposition brightest, you feel a sharp, keen, 
disconcerting thrust. "The Lord sent the hornet." 

Perhaps these small insect annoyances will come in 
the shape of a domestic irritation. The parlor and the 
kitchen do not always harmonize. To get good service 
and to keep it is one of the great questions of the coun- 
try. Sometimes it may be the arrogancy and inconsid- 
erateness of employers; but whatever be the fact, we all 
admit there are these insect annoyances winging their 
way out from the culinary department. If the grace of 
God be not in the heart of the housekeeper, she cannot 
maintain her equilibrium. The men come home at night 
and hear the story of these annoyances, and say: "Oh! 
these home troubles are very little things." They are 
small, small as wasps, but they sting. Martha's nerves 
were all unstrung when she rushed in asking Christ to 
reprove Mary, and there are tens of thousands of women 
who are dying, stung to death by these pestiferous do- 
mestic annoyances. "The Lord sent the hornet." 

These small insect disturbances may also come in the 
shape of business irritations. There are men here who 
went through 1857 and Sept. 24, 1869, without losing 
their balance, who are every day unhorsed by little an- 
noyances — a clerk's ill-manners, or a blot of ink on a bill 
of lading, or the extravagance of a partner who over- 



THE hornet's mission. 



157 



draws his account, or the underselling by a business 
rival, or the whispering of business confidences in the 
street, or the making of some little bad debt which was 
against your judgment, just to please somebody else. It 
is not the panics that kill the merchants. Panics come 
only once in ten or twenty years. It is the constant din 
of these every-day annoyances which is sending so many 
of our best merchants into nervous dyspepsia and paraly- 
sis and the grave. When our national commerce fell flat 
on its face, these men stood up and felt almost defiant; 
but their life is giving way now under the swarm of 
these pestiferous annoyances. "The Lord sent the 
hornet." 

I have noticed in the history of some of my congre- 
gation that their arnoyances are multiplying, and that 
they have a hundred • here they used to have ten. The 
naturalist tells us that a wasp sometimes has a family of 
twenty thousand wasps, and it does seem' as if every an- 
noyance of your life bred a million. By the help of 
God to-day I want to show you the other side. The 
hornet is of no use? Oh, yes! The naturalists tell us 
they are very important in the world's economy; they 
kill spiders and they clear the atmosphere; and I really 
believe God sends the annoyances of our life upon us 
to kill the spiders of the soul and to clear the atmos- 
phere of our skies. These annoyances are sent on us, I 
think, to wake us up from our lethargy. There is noth- 
ing that makes a man so lively as a nest of "yellow 
jackets," and I think that these annoyances are intended 
to persuade us of the fact that this is not a world for us 
to stop in. If we had a bed of everything that was at- 
tractive and soft and easy, what would we want of 
heaven? You think that the hollow tree sends the hor- 



158 



NiaHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



net, or you think the devil sends the hornet. I want to 
correct your opinion. " The Lord sent the hornet.'- 

Then I also think these annoyances come upon us to 
culture our patience. In the gymnasium you find upright 
parallel bars — bars with holes over each other for pegs 
to be put in. Then the gymnast takes a peg in each 
hand and he begins to climb, one inch at a time, or two 
inches, and getting his strength cultured, reaches after a 
while the ceiling. And it seems to me that these annoy- 
ances in life are a moral gymnasium, each worry a peg 
by which we are to climb higher and higher in Christian 
attainment. We all love to see patience, but it cannot 
be cultured in fair weather. It is a child of the storm. 
If you had everything desirable and there was nothing 
more to get, what would you want with patience? The 
only time to culture it is when you are slandered and 
cheated, and sick and half dead. ''Oh," you say, "if I 
only had the circumstances of some well-to-do man I 
would be patient too." You might as well say, " If it 
were not for this water I would swim;" or, "I could 
shoot this gun if it were not for the caps." When you 
stand chin-deep in annoyances is the time for you to swim 
out toward the great headlands of Christian attainment, 
and when your life is loaded to the muzzle with repul- 
sive annoyances — that is the time to draw the trigger. 
^Nothing but the furnace will ever burn out of us the 
clinker and the slag. I have formed this theory in re- 
gard to small annoyances and vexations: It takes just so 
much trouble to fit us for usefulness and for heaven. 
The only question is, whether we shall take it in the 
bulk, or pulverized and granulated. Here is one man 
who takes it in the bulk. His back is broken, or his 
eyesight put out, or some other awful calamity befalls 
him; while the vast majority of people take the thing piece- 



THE hornet's mission. 



159 



Mieal. Which way would you rather have it? Of course in 
piecemeal. Better have five aching teeth than one broken 
jaw. Better ten fiy-blisters than an amputation. Better 
twenty squalls than one cyclone. There may be a differ- 
ence of opinion as to allopathy and homoepathy; but in 
this matter of trouble I like homoeopathic doses — small 
pellets of annoyance rather than some knock-down dose 
of calamity. Instead of the thunderbolt give us the hor- 
net. If you have a bank you would a great deal rather 
that fifty men should come in with cheques less than a 
hundred dollars than to have two depositors come in the 
same day each wanting his ten thousand dollars. In 
this latter case, you cough and look down at the floor 
and up at the ceiling before you look into the safe. 
Now, my friends, would you not rather have these small 
drafts of annoyance on your bank of faith than some all- 
staggering demand upon your endurance? I want to 
make you strong, that you will not surrender to small 
annoyances. In the village of Hamelin, tradition says, 
there was an invasion of rats, and these small creatures 
almost devoured the town and threatened the lives of the 
population, and the story is that a piper came out one 
day and played a very sweet tune, and all the vermin 
followed him — followed him to the banks of the Weser 
and then he blew a blast and they dropped in and disap- 
peared forever. Of course this is a fable, but I wish I 
could, on the sweet flute of the Gospel, draw forth all the 
nibbling and burrowing annoyances of your life, and play 
them down into the depths forever. How many touches 
did the artist give to his picture of " Cotopaxi," or his 
"Heart of the Andes?" I suppose about fifty thousand 
touches. I hear the canvas saving, "Why do you keep 
me trembling with that pencil so long? Why don't you 
put it on in one dash?" " No," says the artist, " I know 



160 



NIGHT SIDES OF CITY LIFE. 



how to make a painting; it will take fifty thousand of 
these touches." < And I want you, my friends, to under- 
stand that it is these ten thousand annoyances which^ 
under God, are making up the picture of your life, to be 
hung at last in the galleries of heaven, fit for angels to 
look at. Grod knows how to make a picture. 

If I had my way with you I would have you possess 
all possible worldly prosperity. I would have you each 
one a garden — a river running through it, geraniums 
and shrubs on the sides, and the grass and flowers as 
beautiful as though the rainbow had fallen. I would 
have you a house, a splendid mansion, and the bed 
should be covered with upholstery dipped in the setting 
sun. I would have every hall in your house set with stat- 
ues and statuettes, and then I would have the four quart- 
ers of the globe pour in all their luxuries on your table, 
and you should have forks of silver and knives of gold, 
inlaid with diamonds and amethysts. Then you should 
each one of you have the finest horses, and your pick of 
the equipages of the world. Then I would have you 
live a hundred and fifty years, and you should not have 
a pain or ache until the last breath. " J^ot each one of 
us?" you say. Yes, each one of you. "Not to your 
enemies?" Yes; the only difierence I would make with 
them would be that I would put a little extra gilt on 
their walls and a little extra embroidery on their slippers. 
But you say, " Why does not God give us all these 
things?" Ah ! I bethink myself. He is wiser. It would 
make fools and sluggards of us if we had our way. No 
man puts his best picture in the portico or vestibule of 
his house. God meant this world to be only the vesti- 
bule of heaven, that great gallery of the universe toward 
which we are aspiring. We must not have it too good 
in this world, or we would want no heaven. You are 



THE hornet's mission. 



161 



surprised that aged people are so willing to go out of 
this world. I will tell you the reason. It is not only 
because of the bright prospects in heaven, but it is be- 
cause they feel that seventy years of annoyance is 
enough. They would have lain down in the soft mead- 
ows of this world forever, but ''God sent the hornet." 

My friends, I shall not have preached in vain if I have 
shown you that the annoyances of life, the small annoy- 
ances, may be subservient to your present and eternal ad- 
vantage. Polycarp was condemned to be burned at the 
stake. The stake was planted. He was fastened to it, 
the faggots were placed round about the stake, they were 
kindled, but, by some strange current of the atmosphere, 
history tells us, the flames bent outward like the sails of 
a ship under a strong breeze, and then far above they 
came together, making a canopy ; so that instead of being 
destroyed by the flames, there he stood in a flame-buoy- 
ant bower planted by his persecutors. They had to take 
his life in another way, by the point of the ]>oinard. 
And I have to tell jou this morning that God caji make 
all the flames of your trial a wall of defense and a cano- 
py for the soul. God is just as willing to fulfill to you as 
he was to Polycarp the ])romise, " When thou passest 
throuo^h the fire thou shalt not l)e burned." In heaven 
you will acknowledge the fact tliat you never had one 
annoyance too many, and through all eternity you will 
be grateful that in this world the Lord did send the hor- 
net. ^'Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometli 
in the morning." '"All things work together for good to 
those who love God." The Lord sent the sunshine. 
"The Lord sent the hornet." 
11 



THE HOME GUIDE. 



AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ALL THINGS OF EVERY DAY LIFE, 
ELEGANTLY ILLUSTRATED. 

Encyclopedias are works of Great Labor and Value, often requiring an Au- 
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The aim of "The Home Guide" is to give the very best of all that is to be 
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much practical and valuable information never before published. After manv 
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How to Preserve Health.. How to Preserve Many Thingrs. 

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It is a Home Book, a Family Doctor, a Book of Domestic Pharmacy, a Fam- 
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